Tension has a reputation for being loud, all screeching tyres and slammed doors, so it still surprises me how much of mine arrives during conversations about who sat where at dinner. I write two kinds of crime fiction, one in which the local postmistress is interviewed over tea and one in which somebody might not survive the week. I had assumed they would need two entirely separate toolkits. They need rather fewer than that. The same handful of principles turn up at both desks, adjusted for temperature.
Give a reader a hallway with one door slightly ajar and a light on behind it, and you can stop writing for a moment, because they have already started without you. By the time I get around to describing what is in the room, they have furnished it with something worse than I could manage, drawn from their own private catalogue of unease. That arrangement sits at the centre of writing dread, and it explains why I think of gore as an expensive way to end the conversation early.
The body in a cosy mystery tends to arrive politely. It is discovered rather than witnessed; the violence took place somewhere out of view, and somebody puts the kettle on before the vicar is questioned. In a thriller, the body is more likely to arrive with a warning attached, and whoever finds it has a fair chance of being next. The crime might be identical on paper, but the promise each book makes to its reader could hardly be more different, and that gap is the whole subject of this post.
Midnight in the Aravis is the first book I wrote and the second book I published, which is the sort of detail that sounds like a quirk until you remember what it means. A book that finishes first and publishes second has usually spent a long time being argued with. This one was. Looking back across five published novels, and two fantasy novels written under another name, I can see the argument more clearly than I could at the time. I would like to think I have got better at having it.
Anyone looking at my bookshelves would conclude that two different people live in this house and have agreed never to discuss it. One shelf is full of tidy village murders. The other is full of books that make me check the front door twice before bed. Both shelves are mine, and between them they have taught me most of what I know about the job.
Reviews reach an independent author like postcards reach a house that has been quiet for a while: one at a time, unannounced, and read far more often than they strictly deserve. A few have begun to appear for Fatal Turn of the Tide. I have read each of them more times than I will admit to here, and it seemed more useful to share what they say than to glow about them privately.