Crime in the North East
Feb. 26th, 2019 12:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustThe entertainment of the weekend was a mini-festival of crime fiction, organised by the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts: it was described variously as 'an exciting weekend' and 'a two-day festival', either of which I would think generous for one full day and the evening which precedes it. That said, it was a length that suited us very nicely, and the overall quality of the guests was impressive.
Friday's eve-of-conference opener was Val McDermid, who is never less than entertaining; morning slot on Saturday was Ben Aaronovitch, whom I had never heard speak before (and was keen to remedy that); I have heard Ann Cleeves and Mari Hannah do their double act more than once, and am always happy to give them a friendly wave across the hall; and the closing slot went to Lindsey Davis, an old acquaintance from whom - from whose books, that is - I have become somewhat estranged of late. I hoped to be reconciled, but I'll say straight away that a) I slept badly on Friday night, and was nodding off during that session and b) that it didn't make me want to pick up again with the recent episodes in the saga, but it did make me want to reread the earlier ones. A partial success, then.
Missing from that list is David Mark, a name completely new to me, though he seems to have published a large number of books. He was a likeable presence in conversation, but I wasn't tempted to buy a book.
Theme of the weekend was clearly 'adaptation'. Val McDermid, of course, had been there and done that long since, with Wire in the Blood, and is in the course of a rather different form of adaptation as s play she wrote for radio is being turned into a graphic novel: as she described it, her part in the process now consists in receiving bundles of artwork from time to time. Even Ben Aaronovitch, gloating next morning about how much less work there is in writing the comics which run alongside the 'Rivers of London' novels, talked about twenty pages of writing (I was mildly surprised that his contribution was so great, having assumed that Andrew Cartmel worked from his outline, at most, so that was interesting). Ann Cleeves has no direct input into the two television dramas which carry her name; this may explain why their common feature is fidelity to the place where they are set: the Northumbrian VERA is similar in tome to the Vera Stanhope books, and continues to adapt the new books as they are published (with, if anything, a slight softening of the central character); while Shetland has moved away from the original novels in the opposite direction, Scandi-noir at its darkest complete with severed limbs washing up on the beach. Mari Hannah, meanwhile, is in the early stages of seeing her books adapted for television: "They don't want to start with the first one," she says, surprised, and Ann agrees, no, they don't. I had assumed that Ben Aaronovitch, having written for television before turning novelist, would see it as the natural home of his 'Rivers of London' series (perhaps because, although I am rarely excited about adaptations of books I like, this one could be great fun to watch). The author, on the other hand, was quite undazzled by the prospect, and determined that it would only happen if it was done properly (or if he was offered truly phenomenal amounts of money).
This was far from being the only topic discussed, and it's a subject about which I'm liable to become grouchy (I thought we were here to talk about books...) but this constellation of different viewpoints was very pleasing.
Most of the afternoon was taken up with workshops. We were invited to choose two of four topics, two of them useful advice for aspiring writers (plotting a short story / self-publishing) and two useful information ditto (forensics and poisons), so I opted out. I had a leisurely wander round a couple of bookshops, then sat on a bench in the sun and read Peter Pan in Scarlet to the accompaniment of the roar of the crowd at St James' Park. Later,durham_rambler informed me that he had learned two different ways to poison me.
The final session was a quiz, which we were very uncertain about. We weren't alone: the attendance, already less than the event deserved, thinned out noticeably at this point, so that when the organisers divided us into teams of five (corresponding to the number of prizes) we made a neat three teams. They took the quiz very briskly, so there wasn't much time for worrying about what we didn't know - and in any case, purely by luck, we were a well-balanced team. Some of us knew more about television, some about books, and yes, we won - though this result too was very neat, half a mark above the next team, who were in turn half a mark above the third.
So that was fun, and I'd do it again. If I were asked for feedback, I'd say that the KIng's Hall was very splendid, but unless you can fill that space, I'd trade it for somewhere you could lay on coffee. And next time, could we have some workshops for readers, please?
Friday's eve-of-conference opener was Val McDermid, who is never less than entertaining; morning slot on Saturday was Ben Aaronovitch, whom I had never heard speak before (and was keen to remedy that); I have heard Ann Cleeves and Mari Hannah do their double act more than once, and am always happy to give them a friendly wave across the hall; and the closing slot went to Lindsey Davis, an old acquaintance from whom - from whose books, that is - I have become somewhat estranged of late. I hoped to be reconciled, but I'll say straight away that a) I slept badly on Friday night, and was nodding off during that session and b) that it didn't make me want to pick up again with the recent episodes in the saga, but it did make me want to reread the earlier ones. A partial success, then.
Missing from that list is David Mark, a name completely new to me, though he seems to have published a large number of books. He was a likeable presence in conversation, but I wasn't tempted to buy a book.
Theme of the weekend was clearly 'adaptation'. Val McDermid, of course, had been there and done that long since, with Wire in the Blood, and is in the course of a rather different form of adaptation as s play she wrote for radio is being turned into a graphic novel: as she described it, her part in the process now consists in receiving bundles of artwork from time to time. Even Ben Aaronovitch, gloating next morning about how much less work there is in writing the comics which run alongside the 'Rivers of London' novels, talked about twenty pages of writing (I was mildly surprised that his contribution was so great, having assumed that Andrew Cartmel worked from his outline, at most, so that was interesting). Ann Cleeves has no direct input into the two television dramas which carry her name; this may explain why their common feature is fidelity to the place where they are set: the Northumbrian VERA is similar in tome to the Vera Stanhope books, and continues to adapt the new books as they are published (with, if anything, a slight softening of the central character); while Shetland has moved away from the original novels in the opposite direction, Scandi-noir at its darkest complete with severed limbs washing up on the beach. Mari Hannah, meanwhile, is in the early stages of seeing her books adapted for television: "They don't want to start with the first one," she says, surprised, and Ann agrees, no, they don't. I had assumed that Ben Aaronovitch, having written for television before turning novelist, would see it as the natural home of his 'Rivers of London' series (perhaps because, although I am rarely excited about adaptations of books I like, this one could be great fun to watch). The author, on the other hand, was quite undazzled by the prospect, and determined that it would only happen if it was done properly (or if he was offered truly phenomenal amounts of money).
This was far from being the only topic discussed, and it's a subject about which I'm liable to become grouchy (I thought we were here to talk about books...) but this constellation of different viewpoints was very pleasing.
Most of the afternoon was taken up with workshops. We were invited to choose two of four topics, two of them useful advice for aspiring writers (plotting a short story / self-publishing) and two useful information ditto (forensics and poisons), so I opted out. I had a leisurely wander round a couple of bookshops, then sat on a bench in the sun and read Peter Pan in Scarlet to the accompaniment of the roar of the crowd at St James' Park. Later,
durham_rambler informed me that he had learned two different ways to poison me.The final session was a quiz, which we were very uncertain about. We weren't alone: the attendance, already less than the event deserved, thinned out noticeably at this point, so that when the organisers divided us into teams of five (corresponding to the number of prizes) we made a neat three teams. They took the quiz very briskly, so there wasn't much time for worrying about what we didn't know - and in any case, purely by luck, we were a well-balanced team. Some of us knew more about television, some about books, and yes, we won - though this result too was very neat, half a mark above the next team, who were in turn half a mark above the third.
So that was fun, and I'd do it again. If I were asked for feedback, I'd say that the KIng's Hall was very splendid, but unless you can fill that space, I'd trade it for somewhere you could lay on coffee. And next time, could we have some workshops for readers, please?
no subject
Date: 2019-02-28 06:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-28 09:50 am (UTC)Also, it seems we are having a Year of Culture. Who knew?
no subject
Date: 2019-02-28 07:09 pm (UTC)