Taking the writing on the road - Craig Robertson

Taking the writing on the road

Craig Robertson

As any crime writer or criminal will tell you, the trick of getting away with it is not to get too greedy and never, ever, return to the scene of the crime. Quit while you’re ahead.

That’s maybe what we should have done after organising the first Bloody Scotland festival in Stirling in 2012. It had been bold and reckless yet somehow we pulled it off. We built it and they came, crime writers and readers in their thousands, and no one got hurt. It was a small but beautiful miracle.

Did we return to the scene of the crime? Well of course we did.

Greedy for more of the same, we did it all again in September. The 700-seater Albert Halls were sold out for both Jo Nesbo and Lee Child, and there were huge audiences for the likes of William McIlvanney, Colin Bateman, Arne Dahl, Denise Mina, Christopher Brookmyre and Mark Billingham,

My own Bloody Scotland experience was a mixed bag. I say mixed, I mean weird. The ever-excellent Chris Carter and I had a full house for our discussion about serial killers.

I also had the dubious pleasure of moderating the formidable pairing of Val McDermid and Stuart MacBride. I say moderating, I mean being hopelessly out of control. Keeping those two in order was like trying to catch flies with chopsticks.

Finally, I was part of our Killer Cookbook event to help raise money for Dundee University’s ground-breaking new morgue. A gang of crime writers have supplied recipes for the book and this was our chance to cook them for an unsuspecting audience. Sadly, I was banned from making human black pudding with scallops and apples. Health and safety gone mad, I tell you.

We should have been satisfied with getting away with it for another year but no. Instead we decided to take the show on the road as part of Book Week Scotland which ran from November 25 to December1.

Bloody Scotland on Tour featured eight events and 24 crime writers and saw us roll into Edinburgh, Dundee, Orkney, Lasswade, Stirling, Glasgow and St Andrews. (If you’re counting, we went to Stirling twice).

Taking a festival on tour is something of a weird concept to start with. The idea is usually that people come to you and get the chance to see a bunch of their favourite writers in one place, with one event after another.

This was more like taking the band on the road again. You know… groupies, roadies, trashing hotel rooms and throwing pianos into swimming pools from twenty floors up. Except without the roadies, room trashing or piano throwing.

It’s really all about the groupies. Or readers as they’re more usually known.

Despite the wonders of social media that let an author tweet a pearl of wisdom, or what they had for lunch, to a few thousand readers with a single click, it doesn’t replace meeting real people. It’s part of a writer’s job to get out there, meet the public and sell a few books.

It’s healthy for us too. By the nature of it, our working day means being locked up on our own and it’s too easy to lose sight of what we’re doing and why. Meeting readers and explaining why your protagonist is so messed up or what you were trying to say with that ending, is a useful part of the process.

It helps that readers are a very friendly bunch and are willing to come out in all weathers to listen to and meet authors. There’s nothing quite like someone telling you they loved your last book to brighten up a wet Wednesday night in Wick. (We weren’t actually in Wick on the Wednesday, we were in Kirkwall on Orkney but the alliteration is much more difficult.)

There’s a real appetite out there for crime fiction and I think there’s probably a morbid fascination for readers to see the kind of people that dream up such brutally violent scenes. The disappointing truth is that most crime writers are actually normal and nice. It’s those chick-lit authors you have to watch out for…

So, have we learned our lesson or will we return to the scene of the crime yet again? Of course we will. Some of the very biggest names in the business will be in Stirling from September 19 next year and I can’t wait. I could tell you who they are but, of course, I’d have to kill you.

Craig Robertson's latest novel, Witness the Dead, is available now!

Legacy: Whose book is it anyway?

Whose book is it anyway?

Alan Judd

A book is a book and a film is a film.  Keep saying that to yourself if you’re ever lucky enough to have a book filmed.  And remember that a film is not better the more closely it resembles your book, just as your book is not better the more closely it resembles real life episodes which may have inspired it.  In each case it is internal dynamics that count.  Art reveals life by distillation, not by repetition.  Otherwise there’d no need for art at all, just microphones and cameras.

Legacy is the second of my books to be filmed for TV.  The first was its thematic predecessor, Breed of Heroes, published 20 years before and featuring the same central figure, Charles Thoroughgood.  I no more intended to write a sequel to Breed than I intended to follow Legacy a decade later with the third in the Thoroughgood trilogy, Uncommon Enemy.  When you write you know not what you may have wrought.

People often ask whether it is traumatic to see your book translated into another medium over which you have no control and little influence.  It is easy to see how it could be: you’ve given your baby to someone else to bring up as they please.  But you have to accept it’s their film, they are making it, they’ve put the money into it, they’re taking all the risks and are working to constraints and demands in terms of time and audience perception which the novelist is blessedly free of.  Also, a novel is almost always a solo venture.  There’s one god and it’s you.  A film has many gods and the most powerful of all is probably the cutting-room god.

Thus, the film Legacy differs significantly from the novel, not only in content – cramming it into 90 minutes meant leaving a lot out – but in ending and in the drama.  People don’t run around with guns and poisons in the book, or get rubbed out because they know too much.  But that doesn’t make the film better or worse than the book, just different.  The requirements of the medium are different and it should be judged by how far it meets its own aspirations and whether those aspirations are good. 

Having watched it grow from first draft of Paula Milne’s script to the final day of shooting only a few months later, it seems to me the film succeeds on all counts.  Very well acted, tightly directed and impressively produced, it is a taut, tense drama of Cold War spying.  It works.  It may seem odd that when I sit down to watch it I tell myself to forget the novel on which it is based, but that’s what you have to do in order to judge it as a film.  Otherwise, you’re judging by criteria – is this bit in my book or what’s happened to that character? – that are not reasonably applicable.  You’d be judging it for not doing that which it never set out to do – repeating your novel on screen.

If you ever write a novel and see it filmed, the best advice I can give is to sit back and enjoy it.  Marvel at the frightening logistics, the numbers involved, the pressures they work under, give advice when asked but don’t make impossible demands and take pleasure in the fact that your solitary work, sweated over long ago, gives lots of people jobs and even more, you hope, pleasure.  Novels can have an after life, a resurrection long after publication, and they can even earn you money.  That’s the other thing to remember about films.       

The film of Legacy will air on BBC 2 on 28th November as part of the channel’s Cold War Season. Click here to order Alan Judd’s fantastic original novel.