Material Witness

Books beyond borders: how the 'net is being cast ever wider

Material Witness is being featured as a guest blog at the 2007 Love of Reading Online Book Fair, which opens today and runs through until Friday. It's a great idea with massive potential and they have some terrific events going on for the next three days.

On a rainy night in July this year, I was hanging around in a bar in the Crown Hotel in Harrogate, sharing a beer with Steve Mosby, author of the excellent but too little known thriller The  50/50 Killer, waiting for Laura Lippman, Mark Billingham and others to take the stage for the celebrated Foul Play feature in the Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival.

Steve introduced to me his Dutch publisher, Steven Maat, who began filling me in on some of his other writers. Among them was Australian Peter Temple. I admitted I had heard of Temple, but had not read any of his books yet.

"You must," he said. "You must read Peter Temple."

And so I did, picking up a copy of The Broken Shore, and I very quickly discovered why Steven had been so insistent.

As the famous ad goes: Ticket to Foul Play at the Harrogate Crime Festival - £7.50. Beer in the bar at the Crown Hotel - £3.50. Rail ticket to Harrogate: £37.60. Getting a hot recommendation for an Australian writer from a Dutch publisher in a bar in North Yorkshire: Priceless.

Priceless, perhaps, but inefficient and rare. The Harrogate experience was terrific. I picked up recommendations for perhaps half a dozen other authors I hadn't heard of, or only vaguely knew of. But Harrogate comes but once a year. I need recommendations for new authors all the time, and not just from publishers, literary critics and the featured writers' table at Borders. But from others who share my fascination and love of crime fiction, and who are prepared to look past Dan Brown and Ian Rankin and Michael Connelly and find the hidden gems.

And that, of course, is where the internet plugs the knowledge gap.

It's been going on for a while, starting with the great retailer in the ether.

There are those in the literary and blogging community that view Amazon as Iran views the US: the Great Satan. For their discounting of books and application of heavy unbearable pressure on independent booksellers. For taking the romance out of buying books.

I've never taken that view, regarding Amazon as an efficient, inexpensive source of books and a lifesaver at Christmas, keeping me away from the misery of the holiday shopping season.

But early on, Amazon introduced me to some of my now favourite authors - Robert Crais and Laura Lippman among them - through their "people who bought this book also bought books by x, y and z". Shameless marketing, yes of course it is. But it's useful.

In the very early days of the internet retailing phenomenon, someone at Amazon was clever enough to recognise the power of the community, of the independent recommendation and harnessed it in a very clever way.

But as people have come to understand the power of the internet as a marketplace for the exchange of ideas, the community has become ever more sophisticated and found news ways to interact. Blogs are, of course, a big part of it. Material Witness was started as a place for me to fill what I perceived as a gap in the literary criticism landscape here in the UK.  The mainstream media, I feel, devotes far too little time and space to genre fiction, making it difficult for those with an interest to find new books and authors.

Once I started doing it, I was thrilled to discover that others were doing the same, and was delighted to become part of a wider community bouncing ideas and recommendations back and forth between themselves.

And more resourceful people than I have found ways  of both extending the community and at the same time drawing it tighter together. Barbara Fister's Carnival of the Criminal Minds is just one such example: a fortnightly tour around the crime fiction world, starting off in Australia, moving on to the West Coast before moving on to the Windy City. The Carnival is coming to a blog near you in about a month's time.

And now we have the Love of Reading Online Book Fair, opening today. I missed last year's event, and I'm fascinated to see how it works and to pick up some new ideas.

And the best part of all this? We're really only at the beginning. The internet is still in its infancy and we've only just started to work out how we can engage with it, and by extension, the world.

Enjoy the Fair.   

A technological interlude: ringtones; spin-my-blog and more

May 16

Not a lot of crime fiction today, but I wanted to share some thoughts from the FT Mobile Media Conference which I attended yesterday at which a hundred or so executives at the forefront of making mobile phone usage a multimedia experience discussed their ideas and experiences.

The first thing that struck me was this: why is that executives in this industry, of all people, cannot get their phones to work on silent or vibrate when they are sitting in a room full of people listening to presentations or participating in discussion? Time and again phones went off, prompting sniggers from the other delegates, embarrassed and hurried rooting through pockets and red faces.

And in some cases it happened more than once.

It reminded me of being on a train quite early one morning when a phone belonging to a middle aged woman went off, with the incomparable Eric Cartman singing "Kyle's Mom's a Bitch" song from South Park. The woman was mortified and went beet red as she delved into her handbag to find the offending phone and switch it off. She then apologised to everyone around her. I told her not to worry, and that it had brightened up a cold winter's morning. And it really had.

But that didn't stop me sitting there wondering what the hell she was thinking . If you're embarrassed by your ringtone, why would you have it on there?

That aside the conference was good. Most of it was about the availability of new activities on the cell phone: music, video, sport, games, community, integrated messaging.

Two years ago, when I delivered the opening address at the same conference, you could have considered me a dyed in the wool sceptic on these types of services. I have always believed that consumer behaviours are immensely difficult to change and that the prospect of, for example, watching video clips online on a two inch screen was not appealing.

But gradually as my own phone usage has changed - I spend a lot of time online for example, and have had a very good SonyEricsson Walkman phone onto which I have downloaded music - I have begun to realise that these phones are no longer really just phones and that their technological capability combined with the younger generations' appetite for communication and entertainment  will ensure that they become multi-functional tools that will ultimately be used in ways that we have not yet even imagined.

And the experts are beginning to imagine some nifty stuff. Disney presented a conceptualisation of an online Pirates of the Caribbean game that could be moved from desktop to mobile, while Yahoo! showed off its OneSearch technology, which finally appears to fulfil the long-held promise of location-based services.

Among other things I found interesting - from a blogger's perspective - was how the phone, and its cameras (video and still) is beginning to have an impact on journalism. We have all seen photos submitted of major events increasingly being used by the traditional media, but a note in the presentation from Ashley Highfield, the BBC's Director of Future Media and Technology brought home just how influential citizen intervention was becoming.

Mr Highfield reported that following the Buncefield oil storage depot fire in 2005, which started at  6.03am on a Sunday, BBC Online received its first photo from a user 6.16am and the first video at 6.23am. Both were before the newswires managed to report the event.

Another related citizen journalism item was the Spin-My-Blog service from Spinvox (the people with the voice-to-text voicemail service which I've been using for some years and love). It's in test at the moment, it seems, but the principle appears to be that if you have something to add, add it immediately using voice recognition technology which is converted to text and uploaded automatically. I can see the sense in the idea, although I'm not sure it'll ever be one for me.

Perhaps the most interesting presentation came from Joanne Shields, President, Internaional of Bebo, the social networking site, who promised a "truly, native social media entertainment forum". The phraseology sounded a bit new media glib to me, but Ms Shields promise was of compelling content, designed for the web and the phone, distributed (broadcast?) through both with an added element of interactivity.

In the immediate future this looks like being realised in the shape of a web drama called Kate Modern, an English take on the incredibly popular LonelyGirl 15, who remains YouTube's biggest ever blogcaster. (This raises the interesting side issue of whether a  'cast  that is scripted and professionally-produced can really emulate the original ramblings of a teenager, but I'm not going there.)

In some way I find this kind of exciting - well, what I can understand of it anyway - but a big part of me is worried that we are producing generations of children who will live their lives through Instant Messaging and Second Life, viewing the great outdoors as something that merely presents the risk of too much glare making it difficult for them to read their screens. I am well on my way to becoming a curmudgeon, I know, but that's where it is at.

Stephen King's Cell - chilling listening for a hot night

July 24, 14.18pm

I can't remember the last time I read a Stephen King novel; I remember starting, but not finishing, Rose Madder not long after it was published about 10 years ago. I read every instalment of The Green Mile as each was published (and became quite impatient for each instalment) and I've seen bits and pieces on television, like Needful Things.

I also read Faithful, the fascinating diary/conversation between King and novelist Stewart O'Nan, Boston Red Sox nuts both, about their team's dramatic championship season of 2004.

But for some reason I stopped reading the novels - maybe I thought I grew out of horror, I'm not really sure. But I had always really enjoyed them.

But last week, I surprised myself by downloading Cell to my iPod,from the very excellent Audible audio book service, for  keeping my mind occupied while my body does what it needs to in the gym.

And it's a ripper - a throwback to, or perhaps even a latter day technological update for, The Stand, my favourite King novel and probably one of my favourite reads of all time. In The Stand, US civilisation is destroyed by a flu like plague which wipes out millions and leaves the survivors - divided into good and evil - to fight over how society is rebuilt.

In Cell the virus that brings chaos, misery and death to New England is the Pulse, which is delivered down mobile phones into the brains of users who are then rendered violently insane and become known as the "phone crazies" by the book's central character, Clayton Riddell, who begins a long journey on foot from Boston to his home in Maine where he hopes to find his son and estranged wife.

King is brilliant at this sort of stuff; the description of Boston being brought to a quick destruction as the Pulse hits is spell-binding. It starts with small but sickening personal dramas played out before an audience paralysed with shock before degenerating rapidly into a total breakdown of the laws that hold society together and an explosive fiery climax.

He is also the master of the moment, playing cunningly with words as readers (or listeners, I guess) wait for the decisive, or emotional, or grisly moment they know is just about to arrive. His psychology is also good - his characters seem to react in a way that rings true and evolve in a convincing fashion.

I listened to an hour or so last night, while trying to sleep in an airless and over-heated London room ailing after the fortnight of extraordinary temperatures we have suffered here, and - now about halfway through a 12 hour reading - was transfixed.

Despite the outlandish nature of the story - at least I hope it's outlandish - King's ability to ratchet up the tension is brilliant. He is a very, very good storyteller, adept at putting his ready right there on the page.

I don't mind admitting that at one point I did pull the window a little closer down and shut the curtains as the hairs on the back of my neck began to stand up, although admittedly this was largely to do with the fear that the giant domestic cat that often uses the ledge as a conduit from one house to the other in the middle of the night, might pay a visit at an inopportune moment and send my ticker into a tailspin.

Withdrawal symptoms

June 5, 14.06pm

No postings over the last week or so as I have been away, and for the first time in a while, out of internet range, which was a strange experience indeed.

The vast majority of places I go or visit, I am rarely more than a few yards away from a PC, but on holiday with the family last week on the coast of Norfolk I opted to leave it all behind and thus remove a potential distraction.

It was oddly disconcerting, being disconnected and not having every last piece of available information and entertainment immediately available. In particular, I found myself missing e-mail.

I did use my mobile's Wap service to stay in touch with cricket scores, but that was really my only indulgence - no TV or radio.

And of course, I have subsequently discovered that it didn't matter one little bit. I didn't need any of the vast weight of electronic data I might have downloaded at work or at home had I had access to it. But I don't expect that to change ny habits.

What I also discovered is that I have an addiction. Perhaps not one as dangerous as tobacco, but an addiction all the same.

What the week off did give me was the opportunity to service a little better another addiction: crime fiction. And what a great week it turned out to be.

I have found John Harvey. Where has he been all my life. More later.

Novel Twists

May 17, 8.22am

The imaginative way in which people use the internet never ceases to amaze me. The latest item to catch my attention was Novel Twists, which I read about in the Guardian and checked out yesterday.

It is the brainchild of one Phil McArthur a former cancer suffered is raising funds for the very worthy Macmillan Cancer Support charity by asking people to pay to contribute - page by page - to a mystery novel. The pages are auctioned, one by one on eBay and the winner of each page has to contribute their 250 to 450 words within 24 hours.

It is a very interesting idea, and certainly a very clever way of raising money for charity.

The results - or at least those in the first 17 pages - are, perhaps predictably, mixed. Most mystery fans like their plots to move at a quick pace, but this is breaking-the-sound-barrier fast. Almost enough to make the reader feel queasy. One or two of the 17 contributors so far have tried to calm it down and add some characterisation, depth and context or just to allow the book to pause for air. But it's going to need a lot more of that in the 233 pages to come otherwise it's going to be messy and utterly unreadable.

It's all very well carping from the sidelines, but that's not really going to help anyone. So I've decided to have a go, and at some point in the next 10 pages, buy one and add to the mix.

Vorsprung Durch Podcast

April 11, 9.20am

I've seen some odd cross-promotion in my time, but quite why BMW has joined the podcasting craze, I couldn't possibly say.

I came across the concept of BMW Audiobooks while cruising around  Guardian Unlimited, which is always a source of fresh thinking and innovative journalism - in fact probably the only newspaper website, in the UK at any rate, to have really understood the full potential and disruptive force of the online medium and tried to exploit it.

What made sit up and look at it was the fact that there is a clever looking tale from Karin Slaughter, that is now sitting on my iPod awaiting my next trip to the gym.

Reading

Pegasus Descending (p78)

Cross Bones (P198)

More later