You Can Tell a Book by Its Cover

By Vicki Delany

Or, you should be able to.

A book cover, as well as the title, is a hint at what lies within. The cover should set the mood and the tone, maybe tell you a bit of the setting. If it's a historical novel, it definitely has to say that right up front. In crime writing, it should give you an idea of the subgenre (thriller, cozy, suspense etc.).

A good cover should entice the reader to pick it up, but most importantly it needs to entice the right sort of reader. I, personally, don’t care for men’s-fiction of international intrigue and rogue tough guys. Thus a cover image of the US capital at night, or rain-soaked Kremlin square won’t attract me.

I also don’t read romance, so I don’t want bouquets of roses or overuse of the colour purple.

And that’s okay, because there’s little point in getting me to pick up the book if I’m only going to read the blurb and decide it’s not for me.

Conversely, of course, you don’t want me to pass over a book that would be perfect for me because the cover says it’s something else.

The cozy novels put out by Penguin Obsidian and Berkely Prime Crime are perfect at this. Look at a cozy cover and you know EXACTLY what you’re getting. Your only decision, as a cozy reader, is if you prefer dogs or cats in your books.

This has come to mind because next week I am having a joint launch with my good friend and occasional Type M contributor, R.J. Harlick. (Tuesday Nov. 17th, 7:00 pm. Heart and Crown Pub in the Byward Market in Ottawa) Have a look at the two covers on this page.

I can’t imagine two more opposite images. They are, all on their own, a pretty good illustration of the range of crime fiction these days.

The light and the dark of it as, Barbara Fradkin said.

The colors of my book, the cute little dog staring at you, the Christmas imagery, and the decorations around the series name. On Robin’s book, the tracks in the snow, the use of black and white, the gloom of the forest in the distance. We hope that Robin’s book gives you chills and that mine makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, and maybe nibble on a Christmas cookie.

Not only the covers tell you something about the books, but the titles do also. What would Rest Ye Murdered Gentlemen be but a cozy! And Cold White Fear, is going to be pretty chilling!

Two crime novels. Both set at Christmas. But they couldn’t be more different. The title and the cover images tell you exactly what you are going to get.

When the dream becomes a reality

This weekend's guest blogger is my very good friend and fellow Ottawa writer R.J. (Robin) Harlick, whose gritty, thought-provoking Meg Harris series is set in the rural wilderness of nearby West Quebec. Part mystery, part thriller, always exciting. Here she blogs about how and why she got started.

I’ve enjoyed the discussion on the Bechdel Test and the gender bias in literature and film. I will admit I could write ad infinitum on the topic, but like Donis, I will save this discussion for over a glass of wine.

At some point in our lives we writers make the decision to become one. Some of us know from a young age that writing stories is what we want to do, while for others, it is a more gradual transformation.

For me, there was never really a definitive moment when I shouted, ‘Yes, I want to be a writer.” I more or less slid into it, starting where most writers start, as a reader. As a child, I devoured books, in particular mysteries beginning with Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and eventually graduating to Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, Dorothy Sayres, Raymond Chandler, Nero Wolf and the like. Sometimes I thought it would be fun to write one of these myself.

Though I loved reading, English wasn’t my favourite subject. I found the piecemeal taking apart of a story destroyed the magical hold it had over me.  But I loved the creative writing part of English classes and would spend many an hour on class assignments making the stories that swirled around in my head come alive with words. Needless to say many had a mystery angle to them.

In university, I continued to enjoy playing around with words. I excelled at making essays sound as if I knew something about the topics about which I was writing, when I didn’t. Studying wasn’t one of my strengths. Perhaps this is where my penchant for creative writing started.

I also continued to read voraciously branching out into the world of the greats. Though I thought it might be fun to become a writer, like Ernest Hemingway or Somerset Maugham, I didn’t treat it seriously. I didn’t really think I had it in me.

This enjoyment for words continued on into my work life. I invariable preferred the writing part of my job to other aspects. But it was business writing; letters, proposals and reports. Nonetheless I continued to harbour the dream of being ensconced somewhere bucolic penning the next great Canadian novel.

To satisfy my need to write, I started recording my time spent at my log cabin in the woods in a journal. Finally, one day after reaching a significant birthday, I decided it was time to find out if I could become the fiction writer in the bucolic setting of my dreams. The setting was easy. I was already sitting in it; the screened-in porch of my log cabin overlooking the surrounding forests. And so I set out to write what would eventually be published as my first Meg Harris mystery, Death’s Golden Whisper.

My first goal was to see if I could even write a novel. Until that point, none of my business writing had approached the 100,000 word length of a typical novel. The next was to determine if I could write fiction, for I quickly discovered fiction writing is a totally different animal from business writing.  As I marched along this new adventure, scene after scene, chapter after chapter, towards the climactic end, I realized I really enjoyed it. And so I decided writing was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Six books and the odd short story later here I am continuing the adventure with the next and seventh Meg Harris mystery, A Cold White Fear.

What about you? Was it a slow gradual slide into becoming a writer or did you know from the get-go that you wanted to be one?

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RJ Harlick writes the popular wilderness-based Meg Harris mystery series set in the wilds of Quebec. RJ divides her time between her home in Ottawa and her log cabin in Quebec. And like her heroine Meg Harris, RJ loves nothing better than to roam the forests surrounding her wilderness cabin or paddle the endless lakes and rivers. There are 6 books in the series. The fourth, Arctic Blue Death was a finalist for the 2010 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel. In the latest release, Silver Totem of Shame, Meg travels to Canada’s west coast, to Haida Gwaii, the mystical islands of the Haida, where she unravels a story of shame and betrayal that reaches back to when the Haida ruled the seas. She is a past president of Crime Writers of Canada. She is currently working on a Cold White Fear, the seventh Meg Harris mystery, scheduled for late 2015 or early 2016 release. Visit her website: www.rjharlick.ca/.