AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2010 - ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN NZ AUTHOR MAGAZINE
Asian drug-running and
British daggers
Wellington-based NZSA
member Bob Marriott talks to Craig Sisterson about being considered
one of the best unpublished crime writers in the English-speaking world
A couple of messages
from the British Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) could end up changing NZSA
member Bob Marriott’s fiction-writing life. Last year, as part of a regular CWA
email newsletter, Marriott, a Wellington-based freelance travel writer and
former Naenae College
Since 1998 the Debut Dagger has been part of the prestigious
CWA Dagger Awards, which for half a century have recognised the best of the
best in the crime and thriller writing world. A glance at previous Dagger
winners reads like a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of crime writing; PD James, Ruth
Rendell, Ian Rankin, Colin Dexter, James Lee Burke, Reginald Hill, Sarah
Paretsky, Henning Mankell, and many more. “When I read the names of some of
the people involved, I thought, well, this has got to be pretty big,” says
Marriot, with a chuckle.
As an unpublished novelist, it was the Debut Dagger that
caught Marriott’s eye, especially since it was open worldwide and many previous
entrants have gone from unknown to published author thanks to the competition. Marriott,
who was born in England but
moved to New Zealand in 1966,
had been working on a thriller for several years; In the Lion’s Throat, an action-packed tale set amongst the
spectacular scenery of Southeast Asia that he
knew so well from his travel adventures. “I’ve travelled extensively and the
characters I have met and the places I visited gave me the idea for a story,”
says Marriott. “I worked on it spasmodically in between articles and travel for
two or three years, then last year decided to finish the book then do something
positive with it.”
One eye-opening trip into the Laos mountains provided plenty of
fictional fodder. “It’s a hotbed of drug smuggling up that way, and they don’t
really hide it in many cases,” he says. “They were growing opium [poppies] quite
openly, and the guide said ‘we grow a little just for our own use’, with a sort
of a little grin at the corner of his mouth, and I thought, well there’s acres and
acres there. What I know about opium you could write on the back of a postage
stamp, but I thought obviously there is more going on than meets the eye. It’s
a sort of fairly lawless, remote area. I found it sort of mystic.”
Entrants for the Debut Dagger, which is open to anyone
writing in the English language who has not yet had a novel published
commercially, must submit the opening chapter(s) of their crime novel (up to
3,000 words) along with a short synopsis of the overall story. Although he
thought his story might struggle to pique the judges’ interest, since it was
“more of an action thriller” than a classic whodunnit, Marriott says he looked
at the Debut Dagger “and thought, you know, what the heck?” After all, you’ve
got to be in to win, and he’d been looking to “do something positive” with his
completed manuscript.
Although he’d finished his full-length novel, Marriott still
faced one final hurdle before he could enter; writing a good synopsis of In the Lion’s Throat. “I found of course
that writing a decent synopsis is harder than writing the book,” he says with a
laugh. Particularly when you’ve only got a certain amount of words - they
wanted 500 words or something like that - to write what the whole book is about.”
A good synopsis is fairly important, as the entire competition is judged \ on
each entrant’s opening 3,000 words and synopsis. Unlike the recent NZSA/Pindar
Publishing Prize (which incidentally was won by another Wellington-based budding
crime writer, Donna Malane), where unpublished authors were shortlisted based
on their extract and synopsis, but then the judges considered the full
manuscripts of the finalists, for the CWA Debut Dagger the winner is chosen
based solely on their extract and synopsis. “The amazing thing is, you don’t
even have to have written the [entire] book,” says Marriott. “I mean, obviously
if you want to get anywhere with it [later] you have to write the book.”
Marriott crafted his synopsis - distilling down his
rollercoaster story of unorthodox Interpol Operator Brett Sadler waging war on
drug smugglers in Southeast Asia and New Zealand into a few hundred
words - paid his £25 entry fee, emailed his entry to the CWA, and promptly
“forgot all about it”. So he was “surprised and delighted” to find out a few
months later that In the Lion’s Throat
had been selected by the judges (which include fiction editors from publishers
Faber & Faber, Orion, and John Murray, along with a literary agent and the
CWA Chairman) as one of the 12 finalists.
Speaking to Marriott in the week before the winner of the
CWA Debut Dagger was announced at the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing
Festival in late July, he says he has no expectations for In the Lion’s Throat to win, and is just thrilled to be on the
shortlist. Rather than being an Oscar-esque ‘just happy to be nominated’ spiel,
when it comes to the Debut Dagger it’s actually the case that being shortlisted
can be as good as winning. Since its inception just over a decade ago, 23
winners and shortlisted authors have been published, and several have gone on
to be recognised by major writing awards around the world. Inaugural winner Joolz Denby was short-listed for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction, 2001 winner Ed Wright
was awarded the 2005 Shamus award for Best PI. novel by the Private Eye Writers of America, and Allan
Guthrie won the 2007 Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year for Two Way Split, developed from his entry
shortlisted in 2001. Barbara Cleverly, shortlisted in 1999, won the CWA Ellis
Peters Historical Dagger award in 2004.
Another author who was shortlisted
but didn’t win has perhaps been the most successful Debut Dagger alumni of all.
Canadian Louise Penny’s manuscript for her mystery Still Life endured two years of constant rejection by publishers
and literary agents around the world, until she decided to enter the 2004
competition. Making it through to the shortlist from around 800 entries that
year, Penny was noticed by agents then publishers, and her career took off.
Once published, Still Life went on to
win the CWA New Blood Dagger (best first novel), the Crime Writers of Canada’s
Arthur Ellis Award, and the Dilys, Barry, and Anthony awards in the United States .
The CWA established the Debut Dagger as a way for talented
new crime fiction writers to be noticed, rather than lost amongst the ‘slush
pile’ of submissions that accumulate on publishers’ and agents’ desks. The
success of Penny’s debut and ongoing career (her Inspector Gamache series has
featured on the New York Times
bestseller list, been nominated for many literary awards, and earlier this year
won the prestigious Agatha Award for an unprecedented third year in a row) is just
one of many examples demonstrating the Dagger judges have a knack for spotting
crime writing talent that might otherwise be overlooked by busy agents and
publishers.
Marriott hopes that being shortlisted may likewise help In the Lion’s Throat get more of a
chance. “The book is actually finished, it’s there for anybody who wants it,
and I’m hoping of course, against hope, that some publisher or agent takes an
interest.”
In the meantime, he’s continuing to travel, and continuing
to write. He’s now working on a second travel-inspired thriller, set in Central America .
Craig Sisterson writes news, reviews and features for
magazines and newspapers in New Zealand, Australia, the Pacific Islands, North
America, and Europe. He is also the creator of Crime Watch, a website focused on New Zealand crime and thriller
writing: http://www.kiwicrime.blogspot.com.
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This article was originally published in the August/September 2010 issue of NZ Author magazine. It is available from the archives of the National Library of New Zealand.
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