Crime Fiction and the Indie Contribution
Formats: E-Book, Paperback
Ages: 18+
Serial killers, private eyes, cops, and bodies inhabit this guide to crime fiction in the electronic age, where reading habits are undergoing change with the growing use of e-books and e-readers.
The focus is on e-books and the independent authors, known as indies, who write them, and the aim is to introduce indie crime fiction to discerning e-book readers.
This guide considers murder and mystery, from the cosy to the noir, and how it has developed over the years, stretching from The Newgate Calendars, through the dime novels and penny dreadfuls, covering the golden age authors typified by Agatha Christie, the hard-boiled era of Hammett and Chandler, and on to the modern crime and thriller novels.
As well as sections on e-books and e-readers, the indie author and publisher, and publishing options, there are sections on many subgenres of crime fiction including mystery, cosy, romantic suspense, historical, paranormal/supernatural, psychological, humour, medical, legal, political, hard-boiled, female sleuths, police procedural, noir/dark, tartan noir, and serial killers.
Chris Longmuir is an award winning novelist. Her crime novels have won the Pitlochry Award, and the Dundee International Book Prize.
Reviews
A page turner of a text book. If you're a crime fiction fan, this one's a must for you. If you also own an e-reader, this is even more of a must. If you are a writer contemplating self-publishing, you can't afford not to read it! Chris Longmuir has written a non-fiction book that verges on the text book, yet is a page turner. It offers a fascinating insight into crime fiction, its history, and its many sub-genres, but also focuses on the rise of the indie book - that is works not produced by the big publishing houses, often self-published e-books. If you have preconceptions about indie books, you need to leave them at the door when you enter this book. Spread across the pages are the author's reviews of indie books in all the various sub-genres of crime, including historical and supernatural, with her honest assessment of each book. It has raised my interest in a number of new voices in crime fiction, and I've already added some of them to my Kindle. It's a book you can read in one rail journey but will want to keep dipping back into.
Excellent guide to good crime eBooks. This welcome venture by Chris Longmuir, who writes excellent crime fiction herself, should be regarded as a standard work and a much needed vade mecum into the world of indie crime. Well researched, detailed, thoughtful, yet lively and readable, this book represents Longmuir's reading of over 60 crime ebooks, some of which she has selected as good enough to feature in detail, giving valuable recommendations to anyone seeking to widen their reading of crime fiction. My Kindle 'highlight' feature came in very handy, as I marked many of the books for future buying after having my appetite for varying kinds of murder whetted by her descriptions. She has focused on the indie ebook market, and her carefully explained criteria allow her to assert that the featured books are as good as, often better than, traditionally published crime novels. This is very useful to the reader, as the market floods with indie ebooks of widely varying quality not only of style and content, but of formatting and editing. Also very useful is the structure of the book: the different sub-genres of crime are defined, and the books recommended under those dark and mysterious banners, so you can choose your poison, or choose to stray outside your normal beat. Her disquisitions on the sub-genres (cosy, hardboiled, noir, police procedural etc) are valuable to any reader, or writer, in the crime world. She makes personal choices in defining these, but explains those choices, and how they overlap, and how the recommended novels fit them. This is no easy task, as indie authors often defy narrow genre definitions: often the reason they end up indie in the first place, as traditional publishers seem to think readers are incapable of understanding crossover books unlike filmgoers or TV viewers who are used to seeing mixed up genres. Longmuir, an award-winning trad published author who is also an indie author, is equal to this task and establishes a body of, well, bodies, which the reader can safely seek out knowing they will be good quality ebooks, by authors to follow up.
Not before time. This exploration of the crime genre in its many manifestations by Chris Longmuir has the added bonus of being right up to date. There are a number of books exploring this genre, but most of them ignore or at best obliquely mention the rise of the Indie writer and the way in which this contribution to crime literature has exploded recently. Chris Longmuir analyses in some depth the various subgenres, including the historical crime novel, the humorous crime novel, the hard-boiled crime novel and romantic suspense, to name but a few. This focus on the variety and scope of crime novels now being written is discussed within the context of crime fiction in general and the section devoted to the development of this genre and the 'Golden Age' authors provides a succinct reference point for more recent novels. This is most certainly a welcome addition to the literature currently available on the genre of crime fiction, written in a most accessible way.
