It was amusing to read in the Guardian Review John Dugdale writing about the trend for copycat book jackets, especially as three of my recent titles fall into one of the categories.  The Single Female Eye.  The book jacket is phenomenally important; it’s what makes the reader pick up the book in the first place or click on the listing.  Though sometimes publishers seem to coy about the notion of imitation.  My first book Looking for Trouble, a private-eye novel, was published by Crocus, a small press, as a result of winning a competition.  On a shoestring, they produced an effective,  three-colour cover (black, white and red) featuring a woman in a car watching a typical Manchester street in the rain.  When I got contracted to a much bigger publisher for my next title in the series, Go Not Gently, they designed a brand new cover.  It featured a woman in a car watching a typical Manchester street in the rain.  ‘Great,’ I said, ‘you decided to stick with the same design.’  There was a flurry of disavowals and denials.  This was four colours, it was a different angle, it was nothing like the first jacket.  Hmmm.

People sometimes ask how much say authors have a cover design.  It’s minimal in my experience (apart from that very first time).  A standard letter goes out along the lines of, ‘We think this is delightful, we hope you agree.’  And that’s that.  To be fair, most of the time it is delightful and I do agree and when I have on occasion raised concerns, which tend to be about the cover not reflecting the tone of the book, I have been lucky to have publishers who have addressed them.  But involvement in the process, chatting with a designer, or thinking up ideas or motifs?  Nope, doesn’t happen.  The most bizarre jackets tend to be foreign translations where one can only assume that cultural differences account for the bemusing designs.  For example the Chinese edition of The Kindest Thing, my novel about assisted suicide, shows a woman in a billowing white dress, face obscured by windblown blonde hair, standing in a wheat field.  But they must know what sells for their market.  Meanwhile I’m waiting to hear about design ideas for my next novel – I’m betting on another Single Female Eye.

Late May was Crimefest in Bristol.  Among the highlights for me was listening to Sue Grafton interviewed by Maxim Jakubowski about her life of crime.  She was by turns witty, insightful, intelligent and warm.  It was also a delight to listen to James Sallis (whose books I love for their language and sense of humanity) debating on panels with other great writers like Andrew Taylor and Sophie Hannah.

A very special event was the discussion hosted by Barry Forshaw between Søren Sveistrup and David Hewson about The Killing – the TV series and David’s recent novel.  We learnt a lot about the process of creating the groundbreaking show as well as the challenges for an author writing a book that both honoured the film and stayed true to the demands of a piece of fiction.  Elements from the TV did not work as prose and David had early agreement that where the demands of the book required he would alter elements of the story.

One aspect that particularly intrigued me was hearing Søren talk about the differences between series 1 and series 2.  Not only was series 2 half the length (at 10 episodes) but there was a conscious decision to do something different each time.  Søren spoke of how the first series was very emotional in its depiction of a loving family torn apart by their loss and he did not want to cover the same emotional territory in the second series.  So series 2 was deliberately less emotionally moving.  I’ve already talked with friends about how I found series 1 much more compelling and suddenly those reactions make sense.  I’m a sucker for a good weep!  Although I was still hooked as a viewer, I didn’t care about the characters in the second series nearly as much.  Søren says he’ll be going somewhere new again with series 3.

Meanwhile David’s novel, one of three he will do, is getting rave reviews.  He spoke of having to radically change his writing style to find something that fit the tone and style of The Killing and of having two screens at his computer, one playing the DVDs and one where he typed up his interpretation of the story.  Apparently the ending is different from the TV version.  I’m writing the Scott and Bailey novels and the business of writing characters that other people have created interests me a lot.  You want to get it right but you also want to bring your own skills to bear on depicting them in action.  One thing is clear, the two media are very different and in order to enter these sorts of projects everyone needs to be happy embracing those differences.