Could YOU be the next Agatha Christie?
Dreamed of penning a bestselling crime thriller? Now the Mail gives you the chance with the return of our novel writing competition. Follow our experts’ advice and you could land a £20,000 book deal
HAve you ever dreamed of writing a book that becomes a bestseller? Could you be the next Agatha Christie, queen of the crime novel? Well, here’s your chance to make that fantasy come true.
Last year, we launched the daily Mail First novel competition with the prize of a £20,000 publishing deal with one of the world’s biggest and most respected publishers, Penguin Random House.
We had 5,000 entries and our winner, Amy Lloyd, won with her disturbing thriller Red River, which will be published here in January 2018. She can expect to make tens of thousands of pounds more from sales around the world — the book has already been sold to publishers in the U.S., Canada, Poland, France and Holland.
We were so impressed by the quality of the entries that we, and Penguin Random House, are running the competition again this year. However, as most of the best entries last time were crime and thrillers, this year we are asking for entries in that genre only.
So delve into the dark and cunning corners of your mind and send us your novels, which can be detective crime, spy thrillers or psychological chillers.
The full terms and conditions must be read online but we are looking for a previously unpublished crime novel aimed at adults. entrants must be aged 16 or over — but there’s no upper age limit so get typing!
We don’t need the finished novel, just the first 5,000 words and a short synopsis, 600 words. The competition is open only to firsttime novelists who have never had a novel published before in any format, including self-published or an ebook. If you entered last year you can enter again, but nOT with the same book as last year.
The judges are best- selling crime writer Simon Kernick, literary agent Luigi Bonomi who will represent the winner, top publisher Selina Walker who will publish the book and daily Mail Literary editor Sandra Parsons.
To get you started, Luigi Bonomi and Selina Walker explain what they are looking for in a first novel, and last year’s winner Amy Lloyd passes on what she has learned from them.
And bestselling thriller writers Susan Lewis and nicci French offer tips on how to make your entry stand out ...
THE AGENT: HAVE A DISTINCTIVE VOICE
OUR winner will be taken on by Luigi Bonomi, whose agency represents bestselling writers Simon Kernick and Josephine Cox. Luigi says: THERE’S a very special feeling you get as an experienced agent and editor when you read a piece of writing that has potential. It’s a kind of tingle down your spine and a sense that you are in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing, and where they are going with the plot, who may be unpublished and undiscovered but writes with confidence and skill.
‘It’s not about fancy vocabulary or attention-grabbing tricks but about the rightness of every word.
When we read the opening of Amy’s Red River last year that’s exactly what we felt: it was as if we’d opened the first chapter of a novel by a long-established crime writer with a huge following.
Her voice was so distinctive and powerful we knew we’d discovered a big new talent. The sense of wanting to read on, wanting to know what is going to happen, is what most excites literary agents and is what I will be looking for in this year’s competition entries.
THE PUBLISHER: HAVE A STRONG MAIN CHARACTER
SELINA Walker, publisher of Century and Arrow Books, Penguin Random House UK. She says: One of the things I love about my job is discovering new writers and reading their exciting stories. each time I open up a fresh typescript I always think — could this be IT, the bestselling novel everyone will want to read.
But as we all know, if you’re a writer, it’s very hard to get your novel directly into the hands of a literary agent and a publisher who can make this happen.
Which is why this competition is such a brilliant opportunity.
Make sure the idea behind your novel is a strong one, and that we can see it playing out in the material you send us.
Last year’s winner featured a young woman who is obsessed by a man serving a life sentence for murder in Florida.
In the opening chapters, we see her, jet-lagged and sick with nerves, visiting him in jail — a great way to start a novel, and it had us hooked and wanting more immediately.
Create a central character we can relate to — Amy’s heroine, Sam, is flawed, unlikeable even, and has a difficult past, but you can’t help wondering what you would do in her situation.
How would you feel if you found yourself alone in a strange country, entirely dependent on a man you didn’t quite trust?
enclose a good covering letter with your entry.
We want to know a little about you, and why you have chosen to write the novel you are submitting to us.
Good luck, have fun, and stick with it. The winner might — just might — be you!
AUTHOR: FIND THE DARKNESS WITHIN YOURSELF
SUSAN Lewis is the bestselling author of 38 psychological thrillers. Her first novel, A Class Apart, was published in 1988. She says: ReAd as many authors/books in the genre as you can. Study the structure of the story and characters, how dialogue is used, how chapters link, when the twists happen and how.
decide on your personality disorder (most thrillers have one) and read everything you can find out about it. If possible talk to experts in the field. This is how you’ll really get to know the sociopath you’re going to spend so much time with.
The weird, and often unnerving aspect of writing thrillers is the delving around in the darkest part of yourself. All characters are developed from within, even if they’re influenced from without.
Putting yourself in a character’s shoes, imagining what they’d do in certain situations, is what drives everything along. When the shoes belong to someone who’s extreme, well that’s when it starts to get really interesting.
There are many ways of approaching these stories; one is to make your antagonist seem quite normal at first with nothing that sets them apart. However, when looking closer there is something not quite right about the eyes, or the smile, or they have unusual responses to ordinary situations.
no one notices the oddness at first — then one person does, but they can’t convince anyone else.
This isolates them, makes them vulnerable, even. They can see darkness where others are still only seeing light-heartedness.
When the psycho realises he/she has been rumbled, he might start playing with the ‘ victim’ in ways that confuse and disorientate; ways that could make the victim sound deranged or paranoid when they try to warn others about the danger.
Another way of coming at suspense is the Agatha Christie way, when everyone is a suspect.
As each suspect disappears so the tension for those remaining really starts to build. It would be vital, I believe, for the writer to know well in advance who did it, or the structure would fall apart.
Getting a grip on the mood of a book is a fascinating challenge.
Bear in mind that, like the story, it is almost always characterdriven. The tone of unease or menace will be set by whoever is narrating at any given point. I learned early on that one way of creating real tension and fear, which usually happens at the climax of a book, is best done in short, sharp sentences.
I get a real kick out of writing characters that twist norms and mess with expectations, but the golden rule is that, in almost all cases, less is more. THe Moment She Left by Susan Lewis is published by Arrow at £7.99, and the follow up, Hiding in Plain Sight, will be available this August from Century at £12.99.
THRILLER WRITERS: THE ENDING IS AS VITAL AS THE START
TWeNTY years ago, we decided — just as an experiment — to see if we could write a novel together.
The entirely unexpected result was a career as the crime writer, Nicci French. So in many ways our experience of writing is like nobody else’s. How do we do it? We spend much of our lives talk- ing about ideas and characters and plots. We do all research together, we talk to people, we travel to possible locations.
But once we are clear that we have found an idea we are willing to spend a year of our lives on, once we are sure we have the same book in our heads, we start writing, and it becomes an entirely separate process.
One of us, say Nicci, will start, write a chapter or so and then send it to me. I am free to ‘edit’ this. Then I continue writing and send it back to Nicci and this carries on until we finish the book. Then we separately, go through the whole book, writing and rewriting. Nicci says: We dON’T have many rules: three, I think. The first is that we edit each other invisibly (rather than pointing out each other’s mistakes). The second is we never tell anyone who wrote which bit: every word has to belong to both of us. And the third is that we are not allowed to reinstate what’s been edited by the other.
We have to trust each other. Without that trust, the whole process would fall apart. We wouldn’t be Nicci French — and we might not be still married . . .
THeir AdviCe:
Obviously you need something that grabs the reader in the first few pages. But the conclusion is just as important. It is disastrous to disappoint a reader at the end — if your conclusion isn’t more than the reader expected, there’s something wrong with your story.
Always imagine a slightly dull person at your elbow asking obvious questions: would she really do that? Why doesn’t he call the police? If the reader starts asking those questions and there are no good answers, then the book dies.
Read lots of other novels — and then write one in your own voice.
Some days are good, some bad, some awful — but you should always turn up at your computer.
When you’re stuck, blocked, there is often a reason: the writing is telling you something
You must be able to be undignified, ridiculous, vulnerable. Put yourself on the line. Be prepared to fail: all successful writing is built on the foundations of the writing that hasn’t worked. Keep at it, and manage to be both full of faith and full of doubt at the same time.
Be prepared for rejection. Few writers don’t experience this at some point. THe latest Nicci French novel, Saturday requiem, is published by Penguin £7.99.