Speculation, Fact and Fiction

Interesting news from Down Under.

CHARLIE RIMMER, THE Group Commercial Manager of Australian booksellers Angus & Robertson, whose letter asking for payment if a supplier's net profit generated for the chain falls below a minimum earnings ratio has so angered Australian publishers, held numerous field management positions with WHSmith - and a regional management position with Borders UK - before moving to Australia in 2005.

There's more in Publishing News and more illuminatingly, considerably more over at Making Light where the full text of this astonishingly arrogant letter is dissected by the ever-insightful Teresa Nielsen Hayden. I can't add anything to her analysis so won't even try.

Then there's the marvellous response from Michael Rakusin, Director of Tower Books. All power to his elbow.

I am waiting with considerable interest to see how this pans out. Given how deleterious the effects of this kind of thing have been on UK bookselling.

Hoo boy, this is going to be fun.

Britain’s bestselling crime writer found himself condemned as “offensive” by a leading female rival yesterday after suggesting that women authors, and gay ones in particular, are more bloodthirsty than men. The acclaimed writer of the Inspector Rebus novels said in an interview last year: “The people writing the most graphic novels today are women. They are mostly lesbians as well, which I find interesting.”

Check out the full article in The Times Online where Val McDermid's pithy response is reported.

Val was also on yesterday's BBC PM programme, responding to some chap who seemed to think crime writing should stay firmly in the cosy corner. As so often, I was cooking so didn't have anything to make notes on to hand, but doubtless the Listen Again facility should offer it up.

The other chap was very well meaning but so clueless and unintentionally patronising that, well, my husband just coming in from work and walking through the kitchen en route to something else, stopped dead and commented 'that's a remarkably chauvenistic attitude!'.

Val was marvellously polite as she kicked the foundations out from under everything he said.

And the best bit is, I'm off to St Hilda's College, Oxford as of this evening, for the annual crime and mystery fiction weekend, (kinda convention thing) where Val's the Guest of Honour. And she's by way of being a pal, what with us both being Hildabeests. So I am really looking forward to the late-might discussion over wine in the Senior Common Room!