Bye Bye Baby: Fast, hard, cheap and good

"In the car, Erica said, `I don't know whether to laugh or cry.'"

Allan Guthrie's Bye Bye Baby is fast, hard, twisted and, thanks to a publishing quirk, cheap.

The novella's publication was pushed back to 2013 and, in the interim, Guthrie secured electronic publication rights. That's why you can read this affecting, ingenious kidnapping tale with a twist for $2.99.

Guthrie wrote Bye Bye Baby for Barrington Stoke's series of crime stories for adult reluctant readers. What does this mean for enthusiastic readers? A story that moves quickly, in short chapters of crisp prose, with plenty of plot turns to hold the attention, and characters you can love and others you can hate. And what's wrong with that?

Like Guthrie's full-length novels, Bye Bye Baby is sly, noir as all hell (more noir than some, actually), and it just might bring a tear of pity to your eyes. It's a police procedural filled with incident and back story, and man, what an ending.

***

Click here for a discussion of the challenges and, just maybe, the possibilities involved in publishing novellas and other short crime fiction.

G© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Up with e-shorts!

I bought Allan Guthrie's novella Bye, Bye Baby last night, and I asked last week when someone was going to put out a collection of Scott Phillips' short stories.

I mention this because I bought the Guthrie as a downloaded e-book, and if electronic books are here to stay, we might as well take advantage of what the medium can do. I don't mean weird technological gimcrackery that in most cases adds up to nothing more than what a simple paperback does at a fraction of the cost, I mean the flexibility to publish narrative forms such as novellas and short stories that might be economically unfeasible as traditional books.

Bye, Bye Baby is about seventy pages; hard to imagine a publisher taking a chance on a traditional book that size (though Five Leaves Publishing Crime Express series does so with, among other novellas, Guthrie's Killing Mum, and Barrington Stoke with his Kill Clock). But lower production and distribution costs might encourage them to do so with books in electronic form.

And where is a reader to turn who loves an author's short fiction and would like it collected in one place, as I would with Phillips or Jean-Hugues Oppel or Dominique Manotti? (Ken Bruen, too, though he's popular enough that some publisher might be able to sell his collected shorts as a traditional book.)

Short-story collections by a single crime author are few and far between, and I suspect uncertainty about their sales prospects helps account for this. So why not sell collections as cheap e-books, or even let readers build their own books electronically out of the short stories they want to read?

What are the barriers to doing things this way? And which crime writers would you like to see come out with collections of short stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Kill Clock

Allan Guthrie's 2007 novella Kill Clock is part of a series for "adult reluctant readers," but I'm guessing enthusiastic readers will like it, too:

"Scotland’s weather was good on the whole. Apart from the summer when Gordon Pearce got too hot. Nothing worse than the sun on your skin, making your armpits prickle and your back as wet as a river-bed.

"But, no, it was spring, and here he was, walking down to the beach in his t-shirt.

"Taking his three-legged dog, Hilda, for a walk."

and

"Now, it wasn’t as if Pearce had suddenly stopped in the middle of the road. He’d been crossing at an even pace. And when he’d set foot off the pavement, there was no traffic. This peanut-headed arse-hole had pulled out without looking. Or maybe it was on purpose. Which was even worse.

"The driver stuck his head out of the car window again, and said, `Why the fuck don’t you move? And take your stupid dog with you.'

"What the fuck was wrong with him? Why couldn’t he just be polite? These days, everyone was a rude fuck."

What's going on here? Short, punchy sentences. A scene made up of short bits of action — mini-scenes — each with a punch line of its own. And bits of rough humor. Sounds like this could also work for reluctant writers.

Read a sample chapter from Kill Clock here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009