I have an essay, entitled “The Deader the Better: On Writing the Murder” in this fine collection devoted to the craft of crime fiction. Writing the Murder (Dead Ink Books), edited by Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst, comes out on 26th September, but you can pre-order it as of today.

Here’s a short extract:

…It is difficult to overstate the thematic importance of murder for any writer, let alone a crime writer — it is bound up with the mysteries of being and not being, inscription and erasure. Jasper Johns famously described Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) as an ‘additive subtraction’, but could not this be said of all works of art and literature? A painting, according to Picasso, is ‘a sum of destructions’. All books are the result of elimination and omission, revision and redaction — killing your darlings (the original phrase, coined by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in 1914, was actually ‘[m]urder your darlings’). Lavinia Greenlaw recounts how her writing is ‘shaped by the stories [she] will not tell’ (Some Answers Without Questions, 2021). ‘Destruction was my Beatrice,’ declared the poet Stéphane Mallarmé apropos of his writing method.