James McCreet’s debut novel, The Incendiary’s Trail, was originally published in 2009 by Macmillan New Writing, an initiative/imprint of major publishing house Pan Macmillan whereby new, unpublished writers are a given a book deal with no advance, but a much larger royalty percentage than a regular contract would offer. James is something of a success story for this imprint, as in January 2010, The Incendiary’s Trail was re-published under the main Pan Macmillan banner. A sequel, The Vice Society, is scheduled for May this year, also under Pan Macmillan, and James is working on the third.
Later this week I’ll be posting my own thoughts on the first book, which is a period Victorian detective story. As James says:
I’ve always been interested in detective novels and, after completing a postgraduate thesis on the origins of the genre, I wondered if it was possible to add something to what I had already read. The idea of having multiple investigators working on a single case has since become a theme with a lot of narrative potential and I hope that I’m writing something that will interest long-time fans of the genre. Setting the books in Victorian London harks back to those origins of Poe, Dickens and de Quincey, as well as providing an exciting location of limitless novelty. I’d say the city itself is definitely a major character.
Ladies and gentlemen, James McCreet! Read More | Comments
