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.