Stieg Larsson | Interview with the girl who kicked up a fuss but got no money |

My interview with Eva Gabrielsson, Stieg Larsson's long term partner, has just been posted on the Big Issue Scotland website.
For those of you who perhaps don't know -  perhaps you have just emerged from a long term retreat in a  Buddhist monastery - Larsson is the Swedish author whose Millennium trilogy has re-written the rule book in terms of what a crime novelist can and should do to grab an international audience.
Poor Larsson died before his first novel was even published. But his work has become a global phenomenon and earned millions. Money which his partner - in Britain she would have the status of a spouse, a wife - has not seen a penny of because of the oddness of Sweden's inheritance laws and a family dispute with Larsson's father and brother.
You can read all about it by following the link above or below. Eva is a compelling speaker, a wronged woman it is hard not to feel sorry for. But as with Larsson's novels, you sense that there may well be more to it than first appears.
And while you are on the Big Issue site, remember to look up the Top100Books challenge and to send in your own ten best loved books.

http://www.bigissuescotland.com/features/view/571

Top 100 Books | What would be your criminal top ten? | Crime

Crime pays: it is the one genre that you can rely on to get decent sales. For most aspiring writers it is the first stop on the road to get published.

It's popular. But it is also serious. There's nothing funny about serial killers, crimes of passion or revenge murders. As a result, crime writers tend to get feted in a way romance writers don't - and while often this is unfair, you can see the reason why. Crime is a serious business.

Don't forget to send us your top ten for the Big Issue's Top100Books

It is also ubiquitous. There might not be mansion house mysteries every second week a la Agatha Christie, but murders do happen at a relatively frequent rate. Our news broadcasts are full of them.

The typical murder tends to be horribly banal: a drunken argument in which someone grabs a knife. We get a lot of that in Scotland.

But others are something else. You have the domestics: fathers taking revenge on their wives in the most horrific fashion. You have the criminal: gangland hits. And you have the premeditated crimes of passion.

Anyone who thinks the extraordinary only happens between the covers of a Henning Mankell novel should reflect on the Raoul Moat case - the inquest into which is currently underway. Moat was a broken hearted body builder armed to the teeth on a rampage round sleepy Northumberland. Definitely one from the you couldn't make it up category.

I'm not a crime geek by any means - there are some embarrassing gaps in my knowledge of the genre - but here's my top ten favourite crime books of the moment. I've numbered them one to ten, but they are not in any particular order. And yes, perhaps I've been a bit loose with the genre definition.

1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

Changed the rules as far as crime fiction is concerned. Brought supermarket lists to the heart of the narrative. A lot of frozen pizza.

2. Fingersmith, Sarah Waters

A glorious Gothic narrative set in the Victorian underworld.

3. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie

Christie excelled herself with this one: the narrative broke all the rules of the day and still reads in a startling modern way.

4. The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey

I came across this after a recommendation. Brilliantly clever, historical detective work.

5. The Unquiet, John Connolly

Seriously dark, exciting and well written.

6. Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie

I might have picked one of several other Christies too, but this one has it all: the location, the plotting, the characters...

7. Tell No One, Harlan Coben

If you've not read it, buy it right away. Brilliant, pacy, intelligent thriller which was turned into a movie, in France oddly enough, that was just as good.

8. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

Slightly marred by the fact that I can't help think of Sean Connery as Brother William of Baskerville, but a brilliant piece of medieaval monkish detective work just the same.

9. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John Le Carre

Gripping book from one of the masters.

10. LA Confidential, James Ellroy

Ellroy at his best: fantastic depiction of an America steeped in corruption.

Neil Gaiman | Books | Competitive reading: it's not what novels you've read that count, but how many

It's the dark not so secret truth at the heart of ever book obsessed individual. It's why so many of us are resisting e-books - at least in part. Because it isn't what you've read that really counts, it is how many, how thick they were, and the fact you have them piled up around the house.

The book group was comparing and contrasting the other day and three members discovered to their delight that I had not yet read American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I've read four of his books, but not that one. It's on my to do list, but it is a big book and big books take time so I've not tackled it yet.

But there was a certain glee in the fact that neither I or another group member had got round to it yet. This was one-upmanship at its most raw. A notch on the bedpost we couldn't claim but they could.

Reading is a deeply personal, solitary affair. You have to lock yourself away either mentally or physically in order to consume a book and you do so at your own pace and bringing your own life experiences to it. Films and television are completely different experiences.

And yet the communal aspect of reading the same book as someone else is extremely important. We are compelled to share in what we are reading, which is why book groups, reading lists and the Top 100s are so vitally important. Humans are social animals and we like to know what each other is doing and thinking. This I think explains why some books take off: why suddenly everyone wants to share in the experience of reading a Larsson, Rowling or a Brown. And why some readers generate an extraordinary loyalty to one or more authors, without whom they can not imagine functioning.

The Blackhouse

Peter May, a Glasgow author who saw sense years ago and moved to the milder climate of the south of France, has an illuminating story to tell regarding his new novel, The Blackhouse.

May wasn't a household name when he wrote the thriller/coming of age story in 2004-5, but he had written several detective stories based in China, had won a lot of critical acclaim, and his books had been translated into several languages.

With The Blackhouse he wanted to do something different. He'd worked as a producer for STV's Gaelic soap Machair during the 1990s, and decided to set his new book on the Isle of Lewis, where he and the TV show had been based. He knew Lewis well, though he wasn't a native, and was particularly fascinated by the annual guga hunt, a tradition that reached back over four hundred years.

The guga hunt involves a dozen men from Lewis sailing to a small rock in the Atlantic and spending two weeks there killing baby gannets, plucking them, smoking the meat, and then transporting them back to Lewis where they are considered a delicacy.

May wove a murder story around this hunt and delved into his own past to come up with the complex policeman Fin McLeod. When he sent it off to his agent he was convinced it was the best thing he'd ever written and his agent agreed.

The publishers, though, sent one rejection after another. Everyone praised the book but no one wanted to buy it. One even gave the excuse that they were already publishing another Scottish writer - as if there was some sort of quota system.

It was several years later that he mentioned the existence of the MS to his French publisher at a trade fair in France. She read it, loved it and bought world rights. Now the book has been published in the UK, in its original English, by Quercus, the publisher who picked up Stieg Larsson's novels. (The similarity between Larsson's chilly, northern mileu and May's Isle of Lewis hasn't gone unnoticed either.)

In the meantime, the book has been translated into several other languages and won literary prizes. A book that British publishers shunned, in other words, has not only found an audience but has been hailed as a great achievement.

So don't be too quick to discount those manuscripts languishing in the bottom drawer of your desk.

* My interview with Peter May is in this week's Big Issue Scotland Magazine. Buy it from a vendor today.