Category Archives: Alex Barclay

Sunday Salon: Web not on publishing radar?

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When I post a book review I usually include a link to the author’s website. Perhaps because I’ve read more books than usual this week or perhaps because I’m seriously involved with web design in my work right now I’ve been struck by how few authors have decent websites.

  • The first review I posted this week was of Alex Barclay’s Blood Runs Cold. Barclay’s website commits one of the cardinal sins of web design by having a slow to-load flash gizmo that you can’t skip through and for your trouble you get three lousy links to PDF extracts of Barclay’s books. Ho hum.
  • My next review led me to Alexander McCall Smith’s website which contains some useful information but would not win any design awards in 2009, especially not from anyone with even a slight vision impairment given that its standard font seems to be about 6 or 8pt.
  • At least those authors have some kind of web branding of their own whereas the only site I could find for Leah Giarratano when I posted a review of Voodoo Doll was a short blurb at her publisher’s site.
  • Finally, yesterday’s review of The Red Dahlia led me to Lynda La Plante’s website and prompted this posting. Why on earth in this day and age would a successful author have a website that hasn’t been updated in nearly three years?

In some ways I guess Giarratano has got it right: if you can’t maintain a website properly then don’t have one at all. That’s certainly a better alternative than La Plante’s outdated site or Barclay’s singularly uninformative one. But the phenomenon of bad author websites got me thinking: why are there so many authors without a decent web presence? Do they, or the publishing industry in general, still believe that if they close their eyes and wish it to be so the Internet will disappear in a puff of smoke? Do they not realise that the old selling models are crumbling in the web 2.0 world and that making the most of social networking and new media will increasingly be the difference between putting food on the table and having to work a second job to pay the bills? Does no one see that today’s consumers want a little more than hundreds of advertisements for the books?

Of course I’m generalising. There are authors with web savvy including the six authors who collectively blog at The Kill Zone and talk about everything but where to buy their books. These are people whose work I will seek out because of their interesting web presence. Irish crime writers also seem to ‘get it’ if Declan Burke’s Crime Always Pays blog and Gerard Brennan’s Crime Scene NI are anything to go by. And new generation thriller writers like Scott Sigler and J C Hutchins are so enmeshed in new media that they don’t even bother with traditional publishers. They blog and podcast and participate fully in a range of online communities and are, undoubtedly, models for the new millennium.

What about your favourite authors? Any of them have a web presence to be proud of?

Review: Blood Runs Cold by Alex Barclay

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Title: Blood Runs Cold

Author: Alex Barclay

Publisher: Harper [2008]

ISBN: 978-0-00-726844-3

Ren Bryce is the female FBI Agent put in charge of the investigation into the death of fellow agent Jean Transom whose body is discovered on the snow-covered mountains of Colorado. The body is subsequently lost in an avalanche but the investigation continues with Bryce heading up a team of agents and local law enforcement professionals in the small town of Breckenridge. Without a body or any easily identifiable reason for the death they must dig into Transom’s background to find out what led to her death.

I ordered myself a copy of this book after hearing it discussed on Simon Mayo’s Books Panel late last year. I don’t remember what it was that the reviewers said that made me rush to Book Depository and I’ve long since deleted the podcast episode from my iPod. So I don’t now know what they saw in the book but, whatever it was, completely passed me by.

Ren Bryce is immature, unprofessional, paranoid, whiny and completely unbelievable as an agent. Towards the end of the book a vague hint is made as to what might have possessed her to be an alcoholic who sleeps with all the wrong people but by then I no longer cared enough about her to forgive any of her foibles. I don’t know if I’d have felt differently had she been given a better background earlier in the piece. The rest of the characters, of which there are far too many given the scant attention paid to most of them, are two-dimensional, near-misogynist men who are equally unbelievable in the roles cast for them.

The story is not much better. It drones on for nearly 500 meandering pages almost entirely devoid of plot development (90% of which happens in the first 50 pages and the last 75). The rest are full of introspective, paranoid ramblings by the protagonist that are so annoyingly out of context that what story threads do exist are easily dropped. Although ostensibly it’s about the death of the FBI agent there’s another crime badly wedged into the book to make it even more disjointed and complex. Apparently Ms Barclay doesn’t write chronologically and, frankly, it shows.

I can’t decide if this was a valiant, if failed, attempt to take the genre somewhere new or just plain bad. All I know is I didn’t like it. At all.

My rating 1/5

Related stuff

Review at Euro Crime (who liked it much more than I did)

Review in The Guardian (who didn’t)

Interview of Alex Barclay at Crime Always Pays

Sunday Salon 2009-01-25: Expectations

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This week hasn’t been a great week of reading, or blogging, or reading of blogs for me. I have been particularly busy at work which has given me far less time than I’d normally spend on these activities but that’s only part of the explanation. I’ve also been struggling with expectations.

I started out the week tackling Barbara Vine’s The Minotaur for an upcoming discussion at 4 Mystery Addicts. You’ll see from my review that I was underwhelmed. I didn’t know anything about the book itself but I did have an expectation that someone of Ruth Rendell’s experience and skill wouldn’t make such clumsy writing mistakes as the ones which littered this book (Vine is a pseudonym of Rendell’s).

I then picked Alex Barclay’s Blood Runs Cold off Mount TBR. I’d heard the book discussed late last year on the BBC Books Podcast and the reviewers made is sound so interesting that I immediately ordered myself a copy. I’m not sure now what the reviewers found so engaging but the book hasn’t exactly kept me up at night. It’s not awful, it’s just not very memorable. I had no trouble putting it down a third of the way through in favour of something else.

The something else is Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire. Apart from the fact I want to read the book the reason I chose to do it right now was that I was finding it very difficult to avoid seeing reviews and discussions of it at the blogs and reading groups where I hang out online. The first book in this series was in my top ten books of last year so of course I had some expectations but I wanted to have as few as possible when I read the book. I didn’t want to know what anyone else thought: not the publishers (I hadn’t even read the blurb on the back of my copy), not fellow bloggers, not ‘professional’ reviewers. I wanted to make up my own mind with as few pre-conceived ideas as I could. For me there’s nothing quite so annoying as reading a book that doesn’t measure up to the expectations I have of it and these days it’s hard to come to a book with ‘fresh’ eyes and no expectations. But it’s the best way to read.

I’m about two-thirds of the way through The Girl Who Played With Fire so you’ll have to wait to find out how it measured up on the expectations scale. Luckily it’s a long weekend here in Australia so, with the housework sacrificed in favour of reading (again), I should finish it before heading back to work on Tuesday.