Brush with Success

By Declan Burke

SO THE WIFE puts down her latest book-club chick-lit classic, flushes hard and says, ‘Jesus P. Christ, would you ever go away and write about a thirty-something woman with a sophisticated taste for men, shoes and ice-cream but somehow can’t manage to get married and likes to, I dunno, rob banks on the side, maybe?’

‘Hmmm,’ says I, eyeing the vigorously brandished toilet brush, complete with soggy lumps of chick-lit classic still attached, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

So, The Big O: what does it say on the tin, blurb elves?

“Karen can’t go on pulling stick-ups forever, but Rossi is getting out of prison any day now and she needs the money to keep Anna out of his hands. This new guy she’s met, Ray, just might be able to help her out, but he wants out of the kidnap game now the Slavs are bunkering in. A kidnap-gone-wrong caper, it jumps from Karen and Ray to Detective Doyle, on to Frank—a discredited plastic surgeon who wants his ex-wife snatched—and Doug, the lawyer who convinces him to do it. Then there’s the ex-wife herself, who just happens to be Karen’s best friend. Can Karen and Ray trust each other enough to carry off one last caper? Or will love, as always, ruin everything?”

The agent comes on board. ‘This is it,’ he says. ‘This is the big breakthrough. I smell a bidding war.’

A year later, the toilet brush is furry white hedgehog of soggy lumps of rejection slip classics. The general gist is ‘not commercial enough’. The agent says, ‘Maybe we should try that Ken Bruen chap for a big-up.’

Ken Bruen comes on board. ‘A plot,’ he says, ‘that takes off at a blistering pace and never lets up. The writing is a joy, so seamless you nearly miss the sheer artistry of the style and the terrific, wry humour. This isn’t a great Irish crime novel, it’s a great crime novel full stop.’

'Buy a new toilet brush,’ says the agent. ‘We’re away for slates.’

Slates, no. Slated, yes. Still not ‘commercial enough’, say the gatekeepers.

We’re gonna need a bigger brush.

And so as the soggy lumps of classic rejection slips spiral away down

the u-bend, so swirleth the expectations.

Marsha Swan of Hag’s Head Press comes on board. ‘You pay half the costs,’ says she, ‘and we’re on.’

‘Isn’t that dangerously close to vanity publishing?’ I say.

‘All publishing is vanity publishing,’ says she, ‘or else you’d stick your story in the bottom drawer. Besides, no one else wants you.’

‘You had me at “No one else wants you,”’ say I.

So the printing wallahs come on board. Hey presto, The Big O looks like a real book. Hell, it even reads like a real book.

The Irish Independent comes on board. “Irish thrillers,” they say, “don’t get much more hard-boiled than this gritty, violent and wildly hilarious Dublin-based kidnap caper … an out-and-out original, with crackling dialogue and sharp wit.”

The Irish Examiner comes on board. “A Tarantino-like mastery of snappy, clever dialogue … cements Burke’s reputation as one of the wittiest crime novelists around … faster than a stray bullet, wittier than Oscar Wilde and written by a talent destined for fame.”

The Irish Times comes on board. “The Big O carries on the tradition of Irish noir with its Elmore Leonard-like style. Here the dialogue is as slick as an ice run, the plot is nicely intricate, and the character drawing is spot on … Throw them all into the mix and the result is a high-octane novel that fairly coruscates with tension.”

‘Coruscates with tension’? We’d have settled for ‘commercial enough’, thanks all the same.

(By now a lot of people have raised an eyebrow at the title of The Big O. Only one of them has been a man. Go figure.)

So – where are we now? Well, we started out with an 800-book print run, no distributor, no budget for marketing or promo and €3,500 in the hole. Four months on, selling copies on-line through Hag’s Head Press, we’ve broken even, had a distributor come on board, and the vibes are good and getting better. And two small but perfectly formed American publishing houses are making approving noises, although that might just be a bad phone-line connection. Hell, even Pulp Pusher has deigned to give us a plug.

The world is our oyster, with Guinness chasers.

The moral(s) of the story? One, never listen to your wife, especially when she’s brandishing a toilet brush. Two, if your agent advises you to buy a new toilet brush, get him to cut the cheque for it. Three, in a publishing world sent demented by the economies of scale redefined by the likes of JK Rowling and Dan Brown, bottom-feeding co-publishing / self-publishing via tiny independent houses is the new black. We may not get rich doing it, but it’ll be a hell of a story for the grandkids.

Declan Burke blogs at Crime Always Pays 

You can buy a copy of THE BIG O -- post and package free -- at Hag’s Head Press