The Penguin Blog

It's the way he tells it

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘I’m a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I’m a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I’ve been in jail more than once and I don’t do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don’t like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I’m a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.’*

This is Philip Marlowe in the raw, stripped of his wisecracks and telling it like it is. Bleak, sharp and cynical, it tells you almost everything you need to know about the private detective and his world.

Raymond Chandler is one of the great stylists. As good as, if not better than, PG Wodehouse, who also created an equally extraordinary world or way of viewing the world in Bertie Wooster (and who shared with Chandler the Alma Mater of Dulwich College).

You don't read Chandler or Wodehouse for the stories. What happens, and to who, is not why we're reading. The plot is not really the point, whether it might be good, bad or indifferent. Like Shakespeare the plot might be borrowed or secondhand or become secondary to the author's real concern (or, in Chandler's case, made up as he went along). What matters to these writers is the telling of the story.

This is what separates the truly great writers from the mere scribblers.

A few months ago I had a brief discussion with a science-fiction editor-cum-writer over at his blog. He was saying that he'd been told by his agent to alter the style of the story he was working on as big publishers weren't buying that kind of thing: it simply wouldn't sell. He did as his agent advised and they made the sale to one of the majors. I wanted to know what he'd been told to change, which he found difficult to answer, but this led to a discussion of whether readability or a good story was at the heart of these things. He concluded by saying that telling a good story was ultimately what mattered in getting published.

Perhaps this is the case with genre publishing. If so, then it's a shame. Because that suggests the telling of the story - the author's voice - has become a secondary concern. It's the voice that transports us into the author's world, not the story - which is what happens (or 'a narrative of incidents' according to my Chambers). Chandler made his novels up as he went along, famously claiming that when he didn't know what to write next, he'd have someone walk in holding a gun. (Which perhaps explains why there is a murder that goes unaccounted for in The Big Sleep.) The effort went into the words, into bringing Marlowe and his Hollywood neighbourhood alive. This might explain why Marlowe is a more human character than, say, James Bond (who Fleming once described as a blunt instrument) and Sherlock Holmes, who looks at humanity like a scientist might a freakish bug in a petri dish. Marlowe is a man, he has failings. But those failings come out of his strengths: his wits and his morals.

Trouble Is My Business is released on July 31st. This, at last, completes Penguin's reissue of the Philip Marlowe stories (excluding the tantalizingly titled 'Philip Marlowe's Last Case', which I've never read). Eight books to match the eight books featuring the other greatest private detective in the world recently released by Penguin.

If you like crime fiction you should read Chandler. If you like fine writing and sneer at genre fiction then read him and learn to revise your opinion.

And if you still think the story is more important than how it is told, then this might just be the book for you.

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

* I can't for the life of me remember which title this comes from since I scribbled this piece down to go on the page one of these eight editions (great Saul Bass-influenced covers by former Penguin designer Steve Marking) about three years ago.

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'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.'

Not yet they aren't. But one of the most famous opening lines in modern English literature seems to me a good place to start writing about where to begin when reissuing an old book.

A friend of mine over at HarperCollins - in fact the wise chap that employed me here at Penguin a few years ago - had to hire a new copywriter a while back. He was looking for a good way to separate the wheat from the chaff and came up with the rather neat idea of inviting all applicants to supply the current blurb of a book they were fond of together with an entirely new blurb of their own devising. They then had to explain why theirs was better.

Improving on what has gone before in publishing is usually not so difficult since jackets tend to stay on books for many years and by the time publishers get around to reissuing them they look rather tired if not plain antediluvian. Here's an example, appropriately enough, from the Eighties:

 

The blurb on 1989's Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn't sound much like a novel at all:
Newspeak, Doublethink, Big Brother, the Thought Police – George Orwell's world-famous novel coined new and potent words of warning for us all. Alive with Swiftian wit and passion, it is one of the most brilliant satires on totalitarianism and the power-hungry ever written.

Maybe. But it sounds like a bit of a slog.

When it came to doing the reissue (out in July) it didn't take a lot of head scratching for me to decide that a) it was time I re-read one of my favourite books and b) the starting point for writing this blurb had to be the excellent opening line, which manages to be perfectly ordinary until its very last word - which rips the rug out from under your feet. Nice work, George.

By listing some of the words that Nineteen Eighty-Four had added to the English language, the old blurb was trying to get across the book's weight, its sheer importance. Unfortunately, as if with a lot of attempts to make things sound worthy, Nineteen Eighty-Four just comes across as dull. Something to be admired rather than liked.

I think we can do better than that.

‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’

Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in London, chief city of Airstrip One. Big Brother stares out from every poster, the Thought Police uncover every act of betrayal. When Winston finds love with Julia, he discovers that life does not have to be dull and deadening, and awakens to new possibilities. Despite the police helicopters that hover and circle overhead, Winston and Julia begin to question the Party; they are drawn towards conspiracy. Yet Big Brother will not tolerate dissent – even in the mind. For those with original thoughts they invented Room 101 …

This edition is not the Penguin Modern Classics edition. This edition is the one we want to get into the hands of school kids, to grab their short attention spans. So yes, putting the key words - Big Brother, Thought Police, Room 101, Ministry of Truth - in there is important, but that is no reason to leave the story or the characters out. The great thing about Nineteen Eighty-Four is that it is so unsettling, it is so terrifying and bleak (and not much fun as satire, either). To get that across we need to know what's at stake - what Big Brother is opposed to. We need Winston and Julia, their hopes and love, their humanity. Without Winston and Julia there is no tension, no story.

A book might be a classic, big names may rate it, teachers might tell you it is an essential read. But that's no reason not to sell it as if it's brand new - to some people it will be - or not to try to seduce the sceptical reader into turning to the first page despite themselves.

At the same time as Nineteen Eighty-Four we're reissuing Animal Farm:

Both books feature stunning covers by Shepard Fairey - if you're going to grab people, get them by the short and curlies. But don't let either cover art or blurbs distract you from the words within.

Any lazy or awful blurbs on good books you'd like to share with us? And can you do any better?

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

Nineteen Eighty-Four (ISBN: 978-0-141-03614-4) and Animal Farm (ISBN 978-0-141-03613-7) are re-issued on July 3rd.

Buy the pair on Amazon here.

PS I'm offering a pair of these Orwells to the first comment that correctly points out the (ahem) deliberate mistake I made on one of the new covers.

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A word about words

Words. So easy to take for granted.

If you live wherever people gather, words are mostly everywhere you look. But how often do we ponder just exactly what they're doing - not saying, but actually doing?

Three weeks ago I had ample opportunity for word pondering. Against my - not-so, as it turns out - better judgment I was sent to the Arvon Foundation at Lumb Bank, which is located just outside Hebden Bridge - 'lesbian capital of the North' I was informed by at least two people - to spend five days with Dark Angels.

No. Dark Angels are nothing to do with James Cameron's TV series about a bike courier in post-event Seattle. That'd be silly. In fact Dark Angels run a series of courses on creative writing in business. That's pretty much all I knew when I headed up to Yorkshire on a wet Monday evening. Two trains and a very small bus later I trudged down a steep road to Lumb Bank, an eighteenth-century converted mill-owner's house once owned by Ted Hughes. Over the course of the next few hours I was joined by our two tutors, John Simmons and Jamie Jauncey; Steve, who runs Lumb Bank; my five fellow participants Lyn, Julie, Molly, Sue and Marilyn; and Ted Hughes (the cat, female, a bit butch - surely a resident of nearby Hebden Bridge?).

For five days six complete strangers would have to cook, eat, light fires and generally live together while exploring and coming to terms with a number of - sometimes painful - things about themselves as writers. This wasn't writing as therapy. It was therapy as writing.

Each morning, we'd gather in the converted barn and, with the chanting out the way - you might well laugh, but it aerates the blood and clears out last night's cobwebs, never mind the bloody chakras - we'd get down to some serious writing exercises designed to get to the meat of ourselves as writers.

In no particular order - though I suspect the order we followed was crucial to the madness in John and Jamie's method - we were asked to come up with the title and opening page of our autobiography; we had to write our version of the first paragraph of a published novel; we listened to music and wrote what we heard; we committed automatic writing and haiku to paper; we personalized Simon Armitage's Not the Furniture Game which is about Ted Hughes (not the cat, the other one); we formed an imaginary business, writing its founding story and its launch campaign. There were many other activities of a writing nature that I shan't write about here for the sake of brevity.

In-between, while we scratched our heads over our daily homework activities, there were walks, a lunch with Simon Armitage - yes, him again, much wine, piano and guitar playing and singing (not by yours truly) and plenty of time - for me at least - to realise just how complacent I'd become as a copywriter after ten years.

Give me a book and I'll slap a blurb on it in half an hour if need be. I pride myself on getting the job done quickly, pertinently and without fuss. I work on approximately two hundred titles a year so there's no time for mucking about. Yet when I started at Penguin I'd be tinkering with each blurb for days trying to come up with the right formulation of words: a decent structure, pace, tension, a good stab at reflecting the author's style. In short, putting together the most compelling proposition for our ideal reader standing in a bookshop.

Sure, I was green and was learning on the job. And with experience came all the tricks, the instant recognition of this or that requirement and, of course, a certain wisdom that speeds the process up. But wisdom too easily comes at the expense of wonder and fun. The words lose their excitement, playing with them becomes less of a joy. So you tend to experiment less and take fewer risks (if only because you know now that certain retailers and authors are - with very good reason - risk averse). In knowing the rules of the game you become bound by them. And that is never a good place to be.

My week with Dark Angels was about breaking down barriers inside myself. It was about how exciting words can be - not just what they say, but their sounds and patterns and effects, the rhythms and the sheer ruddy joy of playing around with them.

Words do so many things that we easily take for granted, and if ever we take words for granted we're no longer seeing them properly. Worse, we're no longer listening to them. So thank you, John and Jamie and Dark Angels, for bringing me back to the words.

And if you can't spend a week with Dark Angels yourself? Then get hold of a decent volume of poetry. There you'll surely be inspired by other writers, giddy with their own delight in words.

Isn't that the most wonderful place to be?

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

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Nonlinearity

There has been plenty of chatter in the last few weeks about ebooks and ebook readers, technologies which might or might not dramatically transform how we buy and read books. But there has also been the odd item here and there speculating on the future of reading, examining how internet usage might affect how people actually look for and absorb information.

There is a school of thought that says that Gutenberg's invention of the printing press - leading to the demise of the illuminated manuscript and the transfer of knowledge by linear type - actually affected the way that people absorbed ideas and information and that Western Rationalism might not have taken hold without the orderly presentation of text. So it is not implausible to imagine that as more and more knowledge and information is transfered via the internet, with popup windows, embedded video, infographic boxes and all the other eye-catching frippery competing for attention, we might witness significant changes in the way we read, and perhaps in the way we actually think.

This is probably already happening - in The Observer John Naughton quotes a report which described information seeking behaviour as 'horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing in nature.' Teenagers, I was told today, start reading at the centre of a website moving outwards from the middle when something captures their digitally native eyes.

Of course not all books are linear - our sister company, Dorling Kindersley for example produces the most wonderfully designed and illustrated guides and reference books, but for fiction, generally, linearity is the rule. Beginnings, middles and ends. Words following words.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that in a few weeks Penguin will be embarking on an experiment in storytelling (yes, another one, I hear you sigh). We've teamed up with some interesting folk and challenged some of our top authors to write brand new stories that take full advantage of the functionalities that the internet has to offer - this will be great writing, but writing in a form that would not have been possible 200, 20 or even 2 years ago. If you want to be alerted when this project launches sign up here - all will be revealed in March.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

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