MURDER MOST UNLADYLIKE announcement - Hazel and Daisy are going to America!

As you might have heard, it's been a pretty good year for me so far. And things just got even BETTER.

From the Publishers Marketplace announcement:

 Kristin Ostby at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers has pre-empted North American rights for Robin Stevens’s debut, MURDER MOST UNLADYLIKE: A Wells and Wong Mystery, set in 1930s England and pitched as a middle-grade Agatha Christie, featuring Hazel Wong and her best friend Daisy Wells, who find a body in their boarding school and set about investigating the murder. Publication is scheduled for spring 2015. Gemma Cooper at The Bent Agency brokered the deal.

Yes, Daisy and Hazel are coming to America! The lovely people at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers will be publishing MURDER MOST UNLADYLIKE in Spring 2015, and its two sequels in 2016 and 2017 respectively.

Words just can't express how delighted I am to not only have an American publisher, but one as incredible as S&S. I'm so excited to be working with the S&S team and Kristin, and I can already tell that they're going to do a amazing job of bringing Daisy and Hazel to a bookstore near you (if you happen to live in the USA).

I'll bring you more news when I have it, but for now, while everything's still sinking in - hooray.

Putting My Editorial Hat On: So, What Do I DO All Day?

I talk a lot on this blog about my author-life. Unsurprisingly! This is my writing blog. But, as some of you know, I lead a double existence. I have infiltrated the world of publishing, and I spend my days working as an editorial graduate trainee (which is sort of like an editorial assistant, but less so) for Orion Children's Books.

Apparently, this sort of thing is quite common. In fact, next month, as part of the SCBWI's Professionals series, I am joining the exceptionally talented Non Pratt and Phil Earle, two other authors who have secret publisher identities (or publishers who have secret writer identities, depending on how you want to look at it), on a panel about what it's like to see both sides of the industry. You should come! It'll be great.

This has made me think about my day job. Specifically: what do I DO all day? Whenever people ask me, I go a bit blank. I know I'm busy. When I think about my working day, I have a strong impression of busy-ness. But how, exactly, do I spend my time? What do I do before I come home, put on my mask and cape and write crime?

Well, it goes a bit like this ...
 

1. I Help Make Books

(Before we start, I've got to explain that what follows is just a very simplified norm. All of our books are different, and most don't happen exactly like this. Also, I've slightly fudged the order these steps go in, so that it's slightly less confusing. That said, onwards!)

Imagine that the editorial department have just bought a new book. Also imagine, for the sake of this post, that this book is the first in a new illustrated series for 7-9 year olds. (I also do a lot of work on YA books for our Indigo list, as well as our Early Readers for younger kids, and Asterix, which we have the licence to publish in the UK, but just go with me here.)

Now, there's a whole process to go through before an editor can buy a book. But this isn't something that I get involved with. As an editorial graduate trainee, I'll read new submissions as they come in from agents (more on this later), but I don't have the power to commission a book and I'm not involved in the buying process. I also don't help to negotiate terms when an offer is made - again, this is between the commissioning editor and the author's agent. The first time I'll come into contact with a new acquisition is once we've already bought it. I might help enter the terms of the agreed contract onto our system, or check the contract once it comes back from our legal department. I also help the editor fill out initial information forms for our sales, marketing and publicity teams, so they know what kind of thing they're going to be selling.

So we've got a new book! And now the real work begins. The editor will work with the author to reshape the book's story and characters, sometimes quite drastically. Again, though, this isn't something that I'm really involved in. I am not an editor, and so I absolutely do not structurally edit our books. The editor may ask me to read a draft, and give my comments on parts I think might not be working, but the final decision on what to go back to the author with will always be theirs. What I'm doing, while this is going on, is ... admin. I'll send out copies of the finalised contract to the author's agent for signing. As soon as the editor is happy with the state of the manuscript, I'll work to get the author's advance payment signed off. And so on! A lot of my job, you may not be surprised to discover, involves photocopying and/or scanning.

Once the book's text has been finalised, I may be asked to copyedit or proofread the manuscript. This still doesn't mean that I have the power to change anything major. A copyeditor looks for continuity errors (if Portia has green eyes on page 4 and red eyes on page 20, for example), factual errors (if the capital of England is Paris), missing words (like a sentence that reads 'I've got a lovely bunch of.') or missing punctuation (like a sentence that reads 'please dont say that she said sadly'). Proofreading is similar, but generally without the continuity or fact checking element - essentially, as a proofreader you're hoping that the copyeditor who went before you has already spotted these things, leaving you to catch tiny errors like dropped quotation marks and full stops.

OK, so we've got a great manuscript. Now we need some illustrations. The editor will usually have a very clear idea of the way they want these illustrations to look. Sometimes they'll already have an illustrator in mind, but sometimes I'll be asked to go and do some research. Then I take my suggestions to the editor, and they make the final decision about who to offer the gig to. Once an illustrator's been chosen, the editor may also ask me to help draft the artwork brief - to work out how many illustrations we want, of what size, and exactly what we want the illustrator to draw. Once the illustrator has submitted a first round of rough illustrations, I'll be asked to check that they've met the brief, and that what they've drawn matches what's described in the text (for example, if Mrs Tiggywinkle is a hedgehog in the text but a pig in the illustrations, we have a problem). The editor and the author will then have a look too, give their suggestions, and we'll go back to the artist with corrections. When we get final drawings, I'll check them one more time, as will the editor and author, and then the editor will sign off on them. And I'll have another invoice to process!

What we need now is a cover. Sometimes the illustrator will do the cover as well, although it's usually done by our art department. However it happens, though, it's the editor's job to come up with a cover design brief for the artist to use, and this is something else that I get to help with. Sometimes they'll come up with an idea and ask me to draft the brief, sometimes they'll ask me to research covers or cover directions. As always, the final decision isn't up to me - but often I get to make suggestions, and that's pretty cool.

Now we need to create the cover copy - the blurb on the back that tells readers what the book's about. I'm often asked to draft copy for editors, and it's one of my favourite parts of my job. I also help to draft copy for the in-house information forms we use for meetings and the out-of-house information that can be seen on Amazon and is sent to booksellers ... basically, I spend a lot of time helping the editors to fill in forms. Thank goodness I like to write.

Meanwhile, the manuscript and illustrations have been sent up to our production team to be turned into a book-shaped thing. We're sent the PDF back for checking (sometimes I'll help send this out to the author for final edits, although it's the editor who'll be in charge of noting down and adding in any corrections the author requests), and then once we've been through three rounds of checks, the files are sent away to the printers' to be turned into an actual book. When the finished book comes in, I'll send out copies to the author and their agent, and the illustrator and their agent.

And then the whole process starts again!


2. I Help Make Ebooks

So, that's the physical side of publishing. But I also work on the digital side of things. Interestingly, the children's ebook market is still very small - mainly because most kids don't have Kindles or iPads, and also because until recently colour ebooks tended to look ... not great. But now the technology's really beginning to be able to do what we need it to, and more and more kids are getting e-readers, and so I suspect that in the next few years things are going to really start to take off.

Anyway, ebooks. We are lucky in that we have an excellent digital team who (along with out-of-house designers) do the difficult work of actually creating the files. The first time I come across them is when I'm sent an ebook to check. I go through the book, making sure that the images and words are all there, that it looks good and handles well (this is actually really important - we're constantly using new programmes, in new ways, to create our ebooks, and so it's quite usual to come across an odd little glitch that hasn't happened before).

I love being involved with the ebook process, because everyone's working right at the edge of what's possible, constantly pushing to make things better, and that's amazing to be a part of. It proves to me that publishing really is keeping up with change in a very positive way, and I'm proud to be helping that happen. We've just been working on the ebook for Marcus Sedgwick's She Is Not Invisible, to make sure that its text-to-speech function makes it fully accessible to blind and partially sighted users. In fact, all of our ebooks are now being created with the text-to-speech function - which means that we're suddenly able to make our books available to a group of people that we could never have reached before, unless we decided to publish a separate braille edition. I think that's just brilliant.


3. I Help Find Books

I mentioned the submissions process before. Actually, I could (and probably will, one day) write an entire blog post about submissions - after all, I now have intimate personal knowledge of from both sides. I have been on submission, and I also come in to work every day to an inbox stuffed with other people's. Which is slightly bizarre!

When people imagine what editorial work is, they assume that we all just sit around all day reading books. When I hear this, I laugh a silent and bitter laugh, because I am the most junior person in our department, and I therefore have the least responsibility and the least work, and I still can only dream of a world where I would have time to read all the submissions we get in during the normal 9:30-5:30 working day. Editorial staff don't read submissions all day. We read submissions all evening, and all weekend, and all commute. When authors wonder why it's taking so long for an editor to get to their submitted book, it's because of this. We read as fast as we can, and the editors look at everything that is submitted, but editors are not super-beings, and so sometimes it has to take a long time.

Just to clarify, I don't get to make the final call on anything that comes in to the department. It's part of my job to take a look at submissions and feed back to the editors about them. They will then look at the manuscript themselves, and they make the final decision on whether or not they want to make an offer. Often, for various reasons, the submissions that come in just aren't right for our list. But sometimes there's something that totally clicks, and that's the greatest buzz feeling in the world. It's this heart-beating, panicky, acquisitive excitement that's a bit like an inanimate version of falling in love.

Of course, because I'm so junior, once I've found something it's all totally out of my hands. The most I can do is tell the editors how I feel, and then wait to see what they do. Will they agree with me? Will they decide they want it? If they want it, will we get it? I've heard an editor I know describing the process as a bit like gambling, and I think that's an amazing analogy. Publishing might seem kind of calm and staid, but there are moments where it's definitely a high-stakes business.

***

So, that's my job! Of course, I also do a lot of other things - essentially, I am there to help the editors in any way they need, from getting cakes and coffee for author meetings, to scanning in a book, to filling in submissions information, to researching a potential author ... and so on! I never know exactly what each day is going to look like, and I love that element of uncertainty. Publishing is a wonderful industry to be part of, and (from what I've seen of it so far) it just gets more interesting the more senior you get. I get to work with a lot of awesome people, and I know that I'm very lucky!

One final word: I love being part of an editorial team, but I hope I've made it as clear as can be that I'm extremely junior, and there are still a lot of things I don't know. So if I've made an error in this post, that's my personal mistake and I take full responsibility for it.

Oh, and if you want to find out more ... come along to the SCBWI panel on the 5th of November!

A historical murder: The Chocolate Box Poisoner

(Credit: objectlessons.org)

I do love research. It's almost indecently fun. My theory is that history is just the world's longest and most fascinating story, filled with endless tiny offshoots, each amazing enough to blow your mind.

Last week's post was all about arsenic, which (as I've said) is my chosen method of death for the victim of Daisy and Hazel's second murder investigation. I told you about why the Victorians knew not to eat green cake, and also (in the comments) about green ball gowns that gave off waves of poisonous dust as their wearers spun in the middle of a dance. And I didn't even have to make either of those things up!

This week, though, I'm not going to talk about arsenic at all. I'm going to tell you about a case that I came across while writing my MA dissertation (which was all about the influence Victorian murders had on 1930s crime novels - I'm only a little bit obsessed), a crime spree that's so unbelievable that it has to be real. The murder weapon was strychnine, not arsenic, but the ideas behind it - that something delicious might be completely deadly, and that a seemingly respectable person might actually be completely nuts - are absolutely what I want to draw on for my own tea-time murder.

So, here's a story that happens to be true.

An oddly 30s image of Christiana

In 1869, in Brighton, a woman called Christiana Edmunds fell in love with a Doctor Beard. Now, Doctor Beard was married, but that didn't stop Christiana (or Doctor Beard). But then, in the summer of 1870, Doctor Beard decided to break things off, and Christiana did not take this news so well. She decided that the person to blame was the doctor's wife, Mrs Beard, and furthermore that a lot of her problems would be solved if Mrs Beard were no more. So she went out and bought a box of chocolates.

She also went to see a dentist she knew called Isaac Garrett. She told him that she needed some strychnine to poison cats (to us this seems a bit much, but to the Victorians, who believed firmly that all domestic issues could be solved by liberal applications of deadly poison, this would have seemed completely ordinary), and Garrett sold it to her. Then she went to visit Mrs Beard, and she gave her the box of chocolates.

The next day, Mrs Beard felt extremely ill. Later, she would say that she suspected she'd been poisoned, but she didn't speak out at the time. Weird, right? Not in the 19th century. This is something that comes up again and again in Victorian poisoning cases, and it's fascinating: often, the victims couldn't be sure that they were victims. Poison was everywhere, but it wasn't usually very concentrated - poisoners really had to stuff their victim to the gills to be sure they'd die, and conversely the victim tended not to know whether they'd ingested poison by mistake or had been given it on purpose.

These ones are safe! (Credit: Klaus Hopfner)

So far, so normal (or at least normal for a Victorian attempted murder). But what Christiana did next was plain crazy. She began going into Maynard's, a local chocolate shop, and buying boxes of chocolate creams. Some of them she sent out in anonymous parcels -  to Mrs Beard, to many other society families in Brighton, and even to herself. And some of them she returned to the chocolate shop.

Now, here's another point in this story that doesn't make automatic sense to us today. If a customer returned a box of chocolates in 2013 they would go straight into the bin. This is because of health and safety. People are very rude about health and safety, presumably because they have never stopped to really think about the alternatives. Let me tell you this: if you want to make yourself feel very, very thankful about the time and place you live in, all you need to do is read a book like The Arsenic Century. In the 19th century, there were no real regulations on the contents of food and drink, or on what was safe to sell. Vendors would store cake next to rat poison. They'd put boxes of tea next to boxes of sheep dip. They'd lace wine with arsenic to make it look glossy. They'd mix plaster of Paris into sweets - except sometimes they got it wrong and added arsenic instead of plaster. And they'd take anything back from customers and just bung it onto the shelves, ready to be re-sold. Are you thankful for health and safety now? Because you should be.

So Christiana's strychnine-doctored chocolates were sold on to other customers, and people started to get sick. Something was clearly going on - but, as I explained above, it was very difficult to be sure that the poisonings were intentional, or even if they were taking place at all. Germs weren't well understood, and hygiene was just absent, so there were a lot of reasons why a person might get sick to their stomach. Actually, arsenic poisoning was often mistaken for cholera, a massively common 19th century disease.

And then a child died.

I haven't told you the worst thing about Christiana's campaign yet, but here it is: to divert suspicion away from herself, she paid little boys to go into Maynard's for her, buy boxes of chocolate creams and then return them after she'd doctored them. Some accounts I've read have her actually handing out poisoned sweeties in the street, like one of The Witches, but I'm guessing that that's an exaggeration. Regardless, though, she put kids in a situation where they had access to strychnine-laced chocolates, and it's difficult to argue that that's not just willfully evil.

Christiana at her trial

The kid who died, Sidney Barker, wasn't actually one of her helpers - he was a four-year-old from a neighbouring town, and his parents had brought him to Brighton for a day trip. They went to Maynard's, they bought a box of chocolates, and Sidney died a few hours later. It was at his inquest that Mrs Beard finally spoke out - and at that point the game was essentially up. Christiana argued that she'd been sent poisoned chocolates too, and blamed the owner of Maynard's for the poisonings (she'd even been sending anonymous letters blaming him to the local police station - the woman was nothing if not thorough), but it was pretty clear that she was the person to blame. Her trial at the Old Bailey, for Sidney's murder and Mrs Beard's attempted murder, took place in 1872, and she was quite quickly found guilty.

Christiana was sentenced to the death penalty, but this was commuted to life in Broadmoor mental asylum because she was so clearly insane. She died there, in 1907 - and that was the end of that.

Now, as a storyteller, I think this is amazing. The idea of being killed by the nation's favourite comfort food is just so perfect (and by 'perfect' I mean 'utterly twisted'). Then there's the image (true or not) of Christiana stalking around Brighton, handing out poisoned sweets to urchins like a fairy tale witch.

As a crime geek, though, I find it just as interesting - but for slightly different reasons. It's apparently quite unknown - today Christiana has no name recognition at all, and the murder barely features in most texts about Victorian crime. It seems to have hardly made a mark on the national consciousness at the time, and it didn't become part of popular culture like the Rugeley Poisoner or the murder at Road Hill House. (If you're interested in these cases, by the way, or if you think sensational murder reportage began with the Sun, I'd recommend reading The Invention of Murder by the excellent Judith Flanders).

BUT (and here's my dissertation thesis), it WAS famous with one particular group of writers - the Detection Club of the 1930s. Agatha Christie and her friends were all OBSESSED with Christiana Edmunds, and loads of Christie's books (Partners in Crime, A Murder is Announced, Sad Cypress, I could keep going) make really obvious use of the crime. People are always being sent poisoned boxes of sweets in Christie novels, and one of her favourite methods of victim dispatch is ... poison in comfort food. And then there's The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Agatha's BFF Anthony Berkeley, which features a character who's clearly Christie talking about Christiana Edmunds and her poisoning campaign.

So this is a murder that, by proxy, is extremely famous - except that no one's ever heard of it. Isn't that interesting?

Anyway - what you should gather from this is that I'm happily working away, creating enormous character and timing spreadsheets and generally getting ready to officially put fingers to keyboard on Book 2. Although you could argue that this post is a bit of educational procrastination on my part.

Oh well. At least I enjoyed it.

Autumn update: on Allsorts, copyedits, research and my first ever author panel!

Happy September all!

First, some nice author news. The lovely people at Author Allsorts have invited me to join their team (gang? crew?), and so I am now officially An Allsort. Watson even features on their mascot page!

This means that from now on I will also be popping up over on their blog from time to time. Look out for me there!

And, if you want to see me in the actual flesh, you CAN: on November 5th, I will be doing my very first panel, for the SCBWI, as part of their Professional Series. I will be talking with the amazing Non Pratt (by coincidence also an Allsort) and various other excellent people about what it's like to be publishers by day and writers by night (spoiler: quite exhausting but entirely wonderful).

So come along! I will be imparting many words of wisdom (such as: I still can't spell 'submissions' even though they make up about half of my job, and, er - more will come to me in time) and we can all go to the pub afterwards in celebration.

Now, book stuff!

For those of you following the progress of Murder Most Unladylike as it gallops towards bookhood, an exciting update: my last round of edits turns out to have been my last. The plot holes are filled, the timetable clashes have been resolved and the manuscript has been officially handed over to the copy editor.

This is marvelous, and terrible, and terrifying, because it means that the book is essentially done. I can't turn to people any more and say, "Don't worry, it's going to get MUCH better before you read it!" and I don't get to just keep tinkering about with it endlessly.

This is a bit hard to get my head around, because what I've discovered during the all the revisions I've done on this book is how much I LOVE editing. First drafts, for me, are things that have to happen so I can get to the good bit. I know how to make them go more easily (planning), and why they drag when they do (because I haven't planned), but a first draft for me always feels - thin. The characters don't seem as rich as they are in my head, there are sub-plots that I have to leave hanging and the whole world just isn't down on the page yet. But at the editing stage I can take my plodding first draft and start to really play with it.

More and more, I'm seeing the books I write as patterns. They aren't things, rocks that fall out of the sky into my head, they're lots of little strands that I can mix up and weave together any way I want. I can do anything with my story, and that's what the editing process is all about. You take your ideas, and the ideas of your readers, or your agent, or your editor, and spin them together into a newer, better version of your first draft. To me, it feels a bit like advanced-level magic. ABRACADABRA! Now your characters are on a boat! SHAZAM! Now they're speaking French! CRASH! Now they're all women! BANG! Now you've introduced a giant talking ocelot into the middle of a formal dinner party! BOOM! Now everyone's dead!

Rest assured, there are no talking ocelots in Murder Most Unladylike. But it's nice to know that there could be, if I decided that I wanted to. Or at least, there could have been before that final edit. The end of the editing process is the moment when a writer finally has to relinquish control of their pet world, and that's a weird feeling. I can't play with my story any more. I have to hand it over to the copy editor, and then the proofreader, and finally to you. And I miss it!

Which is why I've started to think about writing Book 2.

Yes, I'm back in Hazel and Daisy's world already. I have a title (not that I'm telling you lot what it is yet) and, more importantly, I have a murder weapon. This time around I shall be bumping off my luckless victim with arsenic, and that means that I am currently doing a lot of slightly disturbing research into poisons. So, if you've noticed my Goodreads lately (as one friend did, and messaged me in alarm), be not afraid - I'm just preparing to kill fictional people again.

(c) buildingbuttercream.blogspot.co.uk

In the process, I'm learning many fascinating things. For example, I've finally understood, after YEARS of confusion, exactly why you're not supposed to eat green cake in Peter Pan. 

It's because, in the 19th century, bright green (also known as Scheele's green) was made by using ARSENIC. It was put into everything - household goods, toys, clothes and food - because it looked so pretty. But, by the time J. M. Barrie was writing, the public had caught on to its potentially lethal side effects. They had learnt that green things were dangerous, and so they would have instinctively understood why you should never eat green cake - because it was very likely crammed with arsenic. And that's why the Lost Boys get told not to eat green cake. Because it's POISONOUS.

Isn't that interesting? I do love research. My favourite book at the moment is The Arsenic Century by James C. Whorton - basically, it's an amazingly detailed and very interesting guide to everything about arsenic in the 19th century. I'm about half way through, and I have no idea how any Victorian managed to actually stay alive. Arsenic was literally everywhere (and I mean literally ... literally. You could not MOVE without running into some). Look out for an upcoming geeky blogpost about historical poisonings - but for now, I'm going back to my reading. I've got a new book to write!

Goodreads News and US vs. UK covers, Holiday Edition

Hello again! I am back from my holidays in America with several updates.

First, on the excellent recommendation of Nina Douglas, I have joined Goodreads. I now have a Goodreads author page, which links to this blog and has lots of info about myself and Murder Most Unladylike. You can friend me, follow me or mark the book as 'to read'. As you wish!

Henceforth, also, the reviews portion of this blog will take place over on Goodreads. You can now track what I'm reading on my page, and have a look at the books I've already rated.

Isn't that cool? I don't even need to tell you about all the books I read over my holidays - although I do want to specially mention The Brides of Rollrock Island, The Thirteenth Tale, When You Reach Me, Jack Glass and We Have Always Lived in the Castle because they were all (very differently) WONDERFUL.

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I have also been in many bookshops. Working in publishing has clearly made my book nerdliness reach new levels. I'm noticing cover design and branding so much more than I ever have before, and about half of the photos I took in San Francisco were of US editions of books I'm familiar with in the UK. Because book covers are very interesting! This made me think about the UK vs. US covers game, and that made me want to do a blog of my own about it.

Therefore I am now pleased to present you with the redbreastedbird holiday version of US vs. UK covers. My photos of the US covers are on the left (or above), UK covers for comparison on the right (or below). Thanks to City Lights Books and Green Apple Books, excellent establishments both, for providing the material for all of these photos.


Tampa by Alissa Nutting

Tampa is a book that I read on holiday (and struggled with, actually - half of me thought that it was an extremely clever and thoughtful look at the nastiness of teacher/student sexual abuse, and the other half was just too horrified by how much detail it went into). I had the cover on the right ("Oh I see," said my boyfriend, poker-faced. "It's a book about men's shirts"), which I have to admire. Imagine getting that approved all the way to the shop floor! The US cover I think is great for very different reasons. From far away it looks like writing on a blackboard - but when you touch it, you realise that it isn't just flocked, it's essentially a carpet. It has this gross furry texture that you can't stop touching because you can't believe it's real - essentially, the US cover is the book in physical form.

Winner: UK.


Life After Life by Kate Atkinson  

Another pleasing US cover! I think the UK cover is too busy, and I dislike those random snowflakes. The US cover just looks sophisticated and really beautiful, while still managing to convey what the book's about.

Winner: US.


Scat by Carl Hiaasen

I love the background colour and font of the US cover, but I think it looks like it's being marketed to a younger audience than the UK book. It looks cutesey, sort of Pink-Panther-esque, whereas the UK cover seems more dangerous and adult. It's also a much cleaner design, and I like that.

Winner: UK.


American Gods by Neil Gaiman



 I like the US typeface, and the fact that it's got the World Tree on it, but I am in LOVE with Gaiman's UK covers. They're so dark and gorgeous. Why is the wing there? Who knows. But in terms of design and desirability, I think that the UK cover has the US cover beat.

Winner: UK.


Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

I love this book. LOVE it. I own the UK edition, which actually I really like - there's some subtle genderbending going on in the woman's outfit, and I think it's an intriguing image of her - but I have to admit that the US cover is a lot more successful at conveying what's going on in the book. Foxes awkwardly turning into humans, struggling into male and female clothes that don't fit them. It's neat and attractive and very weird, absolutely like the book itself.

Winner: US.


The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

Quite apart from the odd fact that the left US Sisters brother looks like Eddie Redmayne, the US cover does not compare well to its UK counterpart. The UK cover is so inventive, so iconic and so vibrant ... and then the US version is a dull sepia identicover that could be 50 other books about the Wild West. Snore.

Winner: UK, by a mile.


Children of the Jacaranda Tree by Sahar Delijani

 
















Another really, really clear winner. The UK edition is Weidenfeld and Nicholson (aka my adult counterparts at work), so I guess I might be biased - but really, it's hard not to be impressed with it. It's gorgeously vivid, with colours that sing together, and next to it the US cover just looks like a pale imitation.

Winner: UK, again by a mile.


The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

The US cover, at the top, almost looks computer-generated. The drawing is very rounded and cute and (oddly, for a book with the word 'One' in the title) features Ivan with another animal. The UK cover, below, still looks appealing, but Ivan looks bigger, more like an adult gorilla - and crucially, he's alone in the spotlight. And I like the blue better than the dark green.

Winner: UK.
 

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Another book that I have been vocal about loving recently. The UK cover is Orion (work connection again!) and I think it works - it's very bold and fun - but the US cover is just so charming, simple and sweet that it's hard not to give it the edge. I love the way the ampersand has been made from Eleanor and Park's connecting headphones and I love the drawing of their heads.

Winner: US.


I generally find myself preferring UK covers of books, but I love the floppy way US paperbacks feel to hold. Basically, I like books. Hey, maybe I should be a writer or work in publishing or something. Crazy thought.

The Books that Made Daisy and Hazel

As some of you may know, I finished the latest draft of Murder Most Unladylike yesterday. This means that we're one stage closer to turning my brain's random firings into an actual, physical book.

In a few months, Daisy and Hazel aren't just going to be mine any more. They're going to belong to you, to every single person who reads about them, and some of you are not going to like them. It's a surprisingly scary thought.

Anyway, to stop myself worrying about that, I've come up with a list of books that I was thinking about when I wrote Murder Most Unladylike, a handy guide to what's in Daisy and Hazel's literary DNA. This is where the Wells and Wong Detective Society started . . . 


1. The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

Of course this one was going to be in here! My father gave me a copy of A Study in Scarlet when I was eight (an interesting choice of childhood reading material, and one which may have been intended to make a passive-agressive point about the nuttiness of my mother's Mormon family members), and I've loved Holmes and Watson ever since.

There's a lot of the Great Detective in Daisy. He's a detective who's 's successful largely because of all the localised know-how he has. Take him out of London, or ask him to solve a crime that doesn't involve any of his specialised areas of knowledge and he's just not quite as brilliant. Daisy, likewise, is able to solve the murder because she's made an obsessive study of all the goings-on at Deepdean school. But she's also a bit anti-Holmes: when I was making up my detectives I wondered what would happen if someone as smart as Sherlock was actually interested in human emotions as well as footprints, and Daisy was the result.

Hazel, meanwhile, is a bit of a mixture. She's a tribute to Watson - not the dopey TV version, but Conan Doyle's smarter, cooler original who actually helped Holmes solve his cases - but she's also got Sherlock's three-pipe armchair brilliance. And that's very helpful, because all Daisy wants to do is shout, "THE GAME'S AFOOT!" and wrestle the murderer to the ground in triumph, but she couldn't get there without Hazel.


2. The Famous Five by Enid Blyton

When I was researching Murder Most Unladylike I realised with total horror that I couldn't have any of my characters actually reading an Enid Blyton book. The first Famous Five was published in 1942, eight years after the events in my book (process this, if you can: in the 1930s they had linoleum but no Enid Blyton). But of course, Daisy and Hazel wouldn't exist without Blyton's stories about Mallory Towers, St Clare's and the Famous Five.

The Famous Five are really the Famous Two and Three Complete Idiots. Timmy the Dog contributes more to any one mystery than Anne does to the entire series. In fact, all Anne does is cook and cry, and all Julian does is look after Anne, and all Dick does is chase after Julian looking adoring. They're rubbish. It's up to George, ably assisted by Timmy, to single-handedly protect the Cornish coast from smugglers, and I've always very much respected her as a detective heroine. Like George, Daisy and Hazel are extremely determined to solve their case, and they're also just as willing to take on grown-ups who they think are Up To No Good. Also, they like to eat cake and drink ginger beer while they do it. I hope Enid would approve.


3. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling

This might seem a bit weird at first, but the Harry Potter series made me want to write detective novels. I remember reading Philosopher's Stone for the first time when I was eleven and realising with total excitement that J.K. Rowling had written a whodunit.

Think about it. In each of the Harry Potter books you have to work out who the bad guy is. Most of them actually feature a murder in some way or another. In fact, the whole series begins with the murders of Harry's parents, and it's largely about Harry's quest to bring their killer to justice. And then there's Hermione, superstar girl detective, who always solves the case. See what I mean? Harry Potter is just a mystery series with wizards. There's definitely a bit of Hogwarts in Deepdean, and a lot of Harry, Ron and Hermione's friendship in Daisy and Hazel's.


 4. Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie

I doubt you'll be surprised that I've got some Agatha Christie in this list. It's probably equally unsurprising that I've chosen her school spy story to feature here. Normally, Christie doesn't really write about children, and that's possibly because she's so awful at it. Her under-16s are basically just lumpy, pupal pre-adults, and when I first read her books (aged twelve) this really bothered me. I wanted to read a murder mystery with characters like me, and there just weren't any in Christie. Even the older teenage characters just ended up getting married, which was not a life path I could relate to. I think I wrote Murder Most Unladylike so that my twelve-year-old self could finally read about kids solving a Christie murder.

Anyway, Cat Among the Pigeons is an exception to Christie's general no-children rule, and I think it's quite great. It's got an exciting jewel heist, midnight shenanigans in the sports pavilion, lots of hockey and tennis and even more teacherly intrigue.

It also features a non-white pupil, Princess Shaista. I admit, said princess is an utterly rubbish stock character, but the fact that she's there is really interesting. It made me want to write a non-white, non-English character who was actually a human being, and thinking that was one step on the way to creating Hazel. 


5. Partners in Crime by Agatha Christie

Another Agatha Christie! Everyone knows about Poirot and Miss Marple, but she also wrote other detectives, and my favourite of those are Tommy and Tuppence. They are adorably immature adults (weirdly enough, I think Christie wrote her best child characters when she wrote about grown-ups), and they solve crime by pretending to be their favourite fictional detectives.

What's delightful is how silly Tommy and Tuppence are about really serious things, and how much fun they have with the detection process. That's the kind of detective novel I like to read. I love books that turn the crime into a puzzle to be solved, something that's awful but essentially fixible. And I love making jokes about serious things. Agatha Christie is the queen of all of that.



6. Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley

The cool thing about Sherlock Holmes is that he's always right. When you read a Holmes story you almost don't have to bother working things out for yourself (not that you even can, most of the time, unless you know 800 types of tobacco or the precise footprint tread depth left by a man carrying a body) because he's on the case. But it's also pretty cool to realise that sometimes, even detectives can be wrong.

Trent's Last Case introduced me to the concept of the fallible detective. Trent gets called in to solve a murder and completely screws his investigation up. He accuses the wrong person and awful things happen as a result. To me this was a total revelation. I suddenly realised that the reader could be allowed to be a better detective than the one the author's written. You could beat the professionals!

Daisy and Hazel may think they're pro detectives, but in true Trent style they go horribly wrong in the course of the investigation. They get there in the end (otherwise it wouldn't be much of a detective novel, would it?), but . . . well, all I'm going to say is that they get there in the end.


7. Raffles the Amateur Cracksman by E.W. Hornung

I like my detectives to be a bit bad. Even Miss Marple, for all her kittenish old lady-ness, has a naughty side. A good detective needs to be able to break the rules (and to quite enjoy doing it), and so I think that this series, about a gentleman thief called Raffles and his adoring and spectacularly stupid sidekick Bunny, is pretty wonderful. The author, Hornung, was actually related to Conan Doyle (he was his brother in law), and these books were essentially fanfiction - Hornung wanted to write a version of Holmes where he was against the law rather than on its side.

So Raffles and Bunny go on daring night-time jewel heists, and steal priceless paintings from the Queen's collection, and it's all completely amazing and totally ridiculous. But the important thing about Raffles is that, even though he spends his evenings robbing people, by day he is the quintessential English cricket-playing gentleman. That's very similar to what's going on with Daisy. She seems like the perfect English young lady, but secretly she's a super-cool super-smart detective who will stop at nothing to solve a case. And she, like Raffles, is not above breaking the law - although when she does steal things she always makes sure to give them back afterwards.


8. Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey

This is it. This is the one. I have read a lot of detective novels in my life, but if I had to pick just one to take to a desert island it would be Miss Pym Disposes. It's a murder mystery set in a girls' boarding school, in which someone is found dead in the Gym - basically, Murder Most Unladylike is an adoring tribute to this book. Miss Pym is a fantastically fallible detective (she gets it horribly wrong on numerous occasions), there's a non-white pupil (although she's another stereotype, sadly), and there's a twist at the end so twistingly twisty that your brain will melt with the horrible amazement of it.

Can you tell that I love this book? Tey is a really fabulous writer, and a very clever plotter, and she really deserves to be known much more widely than she is. Don't worry, the person whodunit in Miss Pym Disposes isn't at all the person whodunit in Murder Most Unladylike, so one will not spoil you for the other, but there is a lot of Ley's Physical Training College in Deepdean, and a lot of Miss Pym in Daisy and Hazel.


And that's your lot! Of course, there's an awful lot more where that came from. I'm a bit of a detective novel fan. Let's just hope that Nat likes what I've done to Murder Most Unladylike . . . and that, in eight months or so, you like it too.

Best of the books: May and June

I've been a bit busy lately, for which I apologise. (Wait, no, what am I saying? I don't apologise. I'm becoming too British.)

Anyway, I've been editing and reading and working and so on, and I haven't had any time to blog about it. So, while I've got a brief free weekend (there are only ten other things I should be doing, it's fine), here's a round up of my best-of-the-best recent reads.

The Abominables by Eva Ibbotson

I have a lot of favourite authors. Eva Ibbotson is one of them. But I don't think any other authors have affected the way I live my life more than she has. Ibbotson's main characters are not just good, they're nice, on a really micro level. They move worms off hot pavements, forgive the foibles of unsuitable family members and are kind to weird old people even though they smell a bit funny, and as a child I decided (god help me) that this was how I wanted to lead my life.

Of course, being an Eva Ibbotson heroine is impossible, because it involves essentially becoming Eco-Jesus, but I tried, and to a large extent I'm still trying. I rescue snails from the paths of cars. I chase after people who have dropped small items of baggage. And it's all because of Eva Ibbotson's books.

So I put off reading The Abominables for quite a while, because finishing it meant that I would have read the final words of my guru. And then I finally did read it, and I cried a little bit because it was so lovely.

It's all about a family of Himalayan Yetis who are discovered by a determined Edwardian lady. She teaches them to be kind and polite to all things (they are vegetarians, but still carefully say "sorry," to their food before they eat it), and that's fine for a while - until they're forced to go out into the modern world and seek their fortunes. The rest of the plot is all just classic Eva Ibbotson, with some especially lovely asides about death and how important enjoying life is even though you know it's finite. As a swan song, it's perfect - and as a story it's pretty great as well. Bless her.

4 stars.


The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Of course this one was going to be in here. I went to see his RSL lecture on it (oh yes, Warwick English professors who refused to supervise my dissertation on Gaiman because he wrote 'comix'. My proposed subject got a gig at the RSL being interviewed by Claire Armitstead. And A. S. Byatt reviewed his book. I hope you feel really bad now), and one of the best things he said as part of the talk (although there were a lot of them) was that the only real difference between adults' and children's fiction is that in adult fiction you get to leave in the boring bits.

Unfortunately, that doesn't really apply here, because there are no boring bits in The Ocean at the End of the Lane. It's certainly an adult book rather than one for kids in that it's about how adults remember childhood, but what Gaiman does is pick you up and slam you back into his seven-year-old protagonist's mind.

Ocean is full of the joy of small things, like the way food tastes and the way it feels to run through a a secret overgrown path at the bottom of the garden. But there's also a lot of the everyday nastiness that is so much a part of childhood. Ocean describes how it feels to be small, to be ignored, to be punished unjustly and to be powerless to right that wrong. And then, of course, because this is a Gaiman novel, it's also full of the most amazing flights of imagination - an evil nanny from another dimension, a field that grows kittens, an ocean that can fit into a bucket. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is beautiful and terrifying and incredibly poignant because of how fundamentally real it is, and it's the kind of book that adults should be glad that they're being sold.

5 stars.


Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan

So, this is just one of the best books ever. A reimagining of the Snow White and Rose Red fairytale (and a lot more besides, I spotted Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Rumpelstiltskin and Red Riding Hood and I'm guessing there are more), it does things that I've never seen before in the genre and it's written so well that even her descriptions of furniture sent shivers down my spine.

This book isn't just about fairy tales. It reminds you of why people need fairy tales in the first place - as shield, as consolation, to make sense out of a senseless universe. It's full of magic, but magic used in a way that perfectly expresses some seriously deep truths about human emotions. It's also not afraid to deal with some of the darkest parts of human nature with the kind of rough black humour that's both astonishingly daring and oddly beautiful. Its brand of justice is shockingly, juicily, dreadfully well done (there is a scene at the end of the book so vivid that I read the whole thing with my mouth quite literally hanging open in shock) - ferocious enough to make you cheer, and nasty enough for your higher brain to be horrified at how you're reacting.

Like all the best fantasies, every part of this book is real, and I just can't praise it enough.

5 stars.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Like The Ocean at the End of the Lane, this isn't really a book for teenagers. It's a book about being a teenager. That's not to say that teenagers wouldn't love it. They would! But Eleanor & Park is a quirky love story very much about remembering what it's like to be in your teens. It's about falling in love for the first time, and about all the sweetness and confusion and total insecurity you feel when that happens to you.

Eleanor and Park themselves are two wonderfully off-beat and realistic protagonists who subtly play with the conventions of male and female romantic leads, and it's important to appreciate how rare this is. There are so many impossible, Ayn Rand-style people in literature at the moment, especially in YA - heroines who can't manage to eat a whole lettuce leaf and but then manage to roundhouse kick five fully grown men while wearing a ball gown, for example - but Eleanor and Park, characters who in most novels would be 'too' fat and 'too' thin and 'too' weird and 'too' crazily dressed,  manage here to find very true love in each other. It's the most delicious antidote to all the romance novel nonsense that's out there. And did I mention that Eleanor and Park fall in love through the medium of comic books? Brilliant.

4.5 stars

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

A Monster Calls has basically become my case-in-point when I go off on one of my love-rants about the power of children's fiction to address serious issues in ways that adult fiction sometimes can't manage. It's a heartbreaking discussion about the way it feels to lose a parent ... but it's equally, and just as literally, about the way it feels to have an actual, real monster turn up in your garden.

There are no metaphors in this book. Conor's mother is dying of cancer. A monster comes to his window every night to tell him stories. And both of these parts of his life are portrayed as equally real.

The kids' version is terrifyingly illustrated by Jim Kay - no matter your age, you must not make the mistake of buying the version of this book without pictures - and all in all it's one of the most frightening and heartbreaking things that I've ever read.

5 stars.


Skellig by David Almond

I never read this as a child. I was always afraid of it for some reason. I think I thought Skellig sounded creepy. I was totally right, he is creepy - but wonderfully creepy, and I know my childhood self would have loved this book. Oops.

The plot is exceedingly strange. A little boy called Michael finds a man called Skellig living in his garage. Although it's never directly explained, Skellig pretty obviously a fallen angel who's just given up on life. What he's done is never mentioned, and it doesn't really matter - the point is that he's a bit dirty, a bit tainted, but (although he doesn't realise it) still very much worth loving.

Michael is having a very difficult time himself. He's got a baby sister who was born prematurely, parents who are totally focused on her, and a new house that's basically an overgrown dump. Michael is lonely and confused, but when he discovers Skellig he's suddenly given a purpose. Then he meets strange, lovely Mina, who's homeschooled and who believes in the wonderfulness of the world, and she shows him what he needs to do to save Skellig. That all sounds kind of hokey, doesn't it? Believe me, it's not - instead it's beautifully presented, perfectly paced and totally unsentimental.

4.5 stars