Please Welcome Novelist Ben Aaronovitch

by Ben Aaronovitch

We are delighted to welcome novelist Ben Aaronovitch as our guest.

Ben's new mystery is Whispers Under Ground (Del Rey, July 2012 paperback and ebook formats), the third title in the "Peter Grant" series.

Today Ben tells us about genre confusion, one of the pitfalls of writing cross-over fiction.

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But, but, but … you're reading it wrong!

I, like most writers, have an immediate and visceral reaction to those who criticise my work. First denial — how could they? Secondly anger — how dare they? Thirdly grief — everybody hates me. Fourthly qualified acceptance — everybody is entitled to their opinion, even if it does indicate that they were born in a barn and schooled in a cesspit by dullards. Finally you decide to move on to write the next book pretty much the same way you always planned to. It's only once you've moved on that you can, if you wish, look at the criticism anew and see if there's anything to be learnt from it. Sometimes the results can be … interesting.

Photo provided courtesy of
Ben Aaronovitch

Now a quick word of explanation for the many of you who have no idea who I am. I write what could best be described as a police procedural/fantasy cross over series — it starts with Midnight Riot (published as Rivers of London in the UK) and book 3 Whispers Under Ground has just been published in the US. It is what publishers are pleased to call a cross-over book and came about because I couldn't decide which of my two favourite genres to write first — so I did both at the same time.

So, when you decide to mash up some genres for fun and profit you figure you're going to face some consumer resistance. I thought fans of crime novels might be wary of the fantasy elements and that the SF fans might balk at the police procedural elements, but what I wasn't expecting was what I've come to call "Genre Confusion". This occurs when a reader's enjoyment of a novel is damaged because they make incorrect assumptions about the genre of work they are reading. That this was happening became painfully obvious to me when I started getting reviews for Whispers Under Ground which included lines like this — The plot was total filler, with nothing of real significance taking place with any of our main characters.

Now, the plot of Whispers Under Ground is such that a murder occurs which our protagonist then solves. He's a detective and this is what he does for a living. I wasn't sure how the central murder mystery that makes up the bulk of the novel could be considered filler. Then I read this in another review —

We steadily move through ... filler. Not a whole lot happens, and once we do discover something it's just left alone. If you're reading this in hopes of finding out what happens to Lesley, I'm sorry to say that nothing much happens for her, either. I'm assuming a lot is set-up for the fourth and final instalment [sic] — let's hope the payoff is worth it!

And all was made clear.

The giveaway is in that last sentence. The reviewer is assuming that what he is reading is a standard fantasy novel in which the protagonist is revealed at the beginning and then develops through a number of volumes until a final crisis and resolution. In such a plot the emphasis is on the development of the protagonist, the coterie of the characters around him, and the inevitable climatic denouement which traditionally takes place in the last third of the last volume.

What I thought I was writing was a classic detective series in which you introduce a protagonist in the first book who then goes on to solve mysteries, traditionally at the rate of one or two per book, a process that continues until the author, publisher or audience loses interest. In this classic form the character of the detective rarely changes much from novel to novel, they may marry, have kids, get divorced or, if Scandinavian, be diagnosed as clinically depressed. But they remain pretty constant. Morse, Wexford, Marlow, Carella, Poirot et al. stay essentially the same people from their introduction to their last case.

The reviewers cited above see the self-contained mystery plot in Whispers Under Ground as "filler" because it doesn't directly tie into what they see as the main multi-volume plot. They don't enjoy it because they see it as "getting in the way" of the main action, in other words that most dreaded of narrative ailments — the plot tumour.

Now this is all a matter of degree — there are mystery series that build to a climax and there are fantasy protagonists who fight their way through a series of episodic novels — but the archetype is true enough to cause one of the two big problems of writing cross-over fiction. (The other problem, bookshop section schizophrenia, is a whole different blog post.)

Avoiding genre confusion is harder than diagnosing it. Once you have written a book, and put it out there, how it is read is nobody's damn business but the individual reader's. You might have a legitimate complaint if a reviewer misrepresents the actual content of your work, but how they interpret it — that's down to them. If they want to regard your meticulously crafted mystery plot as "filler", then to them it is filler. You may want to be careful with the cover art, assuming you have some influence on the cover, so it isn't ambiguous, or check that the blurb on the back doesn't given the wrong impression. You may even write long self-involved guest articles for popular blog sites but all that is just tinkering at the margins. People will read your book the way that they want to read it, and there's nothing you can do to stop them.

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Ben Aaronovitch was born in London in 1964 and had the kind of dull routine childhood that drives a man to drink or to science fiction. He is a screenwriter, with early notable success on BBC television’s legendary Doctor Who, for which he wrote some episodes now widely regarded as classics, and which even he is quite fond of. He has also penned several groundbreaking TV tie-in novels.

After a decade of such work, he decided it was time to show the world what he could really do and embarked on his first serious original novel. The result is Midnight Riot, the debut adventure of Peter Grant, followed by Moon Over Soho.

Learn more about the author and his books on his website, The-Folly.com.

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Whispers Under Ground
Ben Aaronovitch
Publisher: Del Rey

A whole new reason to mind the gap …

It begins with a dead body at the far end of Baker Street tube station, all that remains of American exchange student James Gallagher — and the victim's wealthy, politically powerful family is understandably eager to get to the bottom of the gruesome murder. The trouble is, the bottom — if it exists at all — is deeper and more unnatural than anyone suspects … except, that is, for London constable and sorcerer's apprentice Peter Grant. With Inspector Nightingale, the last registered wizard in England, tied up in the hunt for the rogue magician known as "the Faceless Man", it's up to Peter to plumb the haunted depths of the oldest, largest, and — as of now — deadliest subway system in the world.

At least he won't be alone. No, the FBI has sent over a crack agent to help. She's young, ambitious, beautiful … and a born-again Christian apt to view any magic as the work of the devil. Oh yeah — that's going to go well.