New from Five Leaves: Blood Tears by Michael Malone

Michael Malone's Blood Tears is now in our office - bookshop stock will start to go out next week. We have described this novel as Scottish Catholic Noir, though the biggest problem in publishing it was not the wrath of the big man upstairs, but trying to get our two proof-readers to understand that people from the West of Scotland really do say "Come aff it", and that "aff" is not a misprint. There were many such changes where the Scottish wing of Five Leaves had to recorrect the corrections, sometimes twice. Perhaps I should have sent my colleagues on a training course involving reruns of early editions of Taggart. Michael Malone comes from Ayrshire, the home of Burns, though there is little poetic about his rather dark book. It did raise the issue of "dialect" though. The main text and the dialogue had to be comprehensible to Michael's readers outside of Scotland, but had to sound right to those within that country. By and large I share the general view in creative writing that dialect should be avoided, save for a little salting of the text to give flavour. Some writers, Lewis Grassic Gibbon for example, used mostly standard English but you can feel the rhythms of Scottish speech in his Sunset Song. With Blood Tears we were aiming for something more direct but I hope we have not clipped too much off Malone's coin in pandering to the southerners. Blood Tears is the first of a series by Michael Malone, meaning we now have two Scottish crime series running, with a new Russel McLean out this autumn.
Blood Tears is available from http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/blood-tears/, though overseas readers will find it cheaper to order via http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/ to get free overseas postage.

This week in books

It has been a busy seven days at Five Leaves Towers. On the Saturday we did a bit of basking in the glory of a big Guardian review of our 1948. I've already mentioned it on this site so instead I'll suggest you read this blog, by Charles Boyle, about Nicholas Lezard: http://sonofabook.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/patron-saint-of-small-presses.html.
The same day we had a book launch in Nottingham for Joanne Limburg's collection, The Oxygen Man. This was the first in an occasional series of joint events with Nottingham Poetry Society. I was up in Scotland at the time but our Pippa Hennessy(who is, handily, secretary of NPS) struggled through without me. The event was well attended and Joanne read well from a rather difficult book - difficult because it is about the suicide of her brother, a scientist and the "man" of the title.
Another good launch this week, which I was able to attend, was that of our writer and occasional editor David Belbin who, promiscuously, is published by other publishers too. In this case the launch was for his second "Bone and Cane" book with our friends at Tindal Street. What You Don't Know is, I think, the better of the two books - indeed, I think it is excellent, and the author is clearly getting into his stride in this series. Meantime, time to do some work on his Student, coming out from Five Leaves later this year. More on that to follow.
On Tuesday the first Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing took place. I'll post about this fully, soon. Suffice to say that my fellow trustees also managed to struggle through without me on the night. Maybe I don't need to actually go to anything ever again.
Just as well though that I did turn up at Lowdham Book Festival's First Friday event with the Nottingham writer AR Dance (the man who proves that some self published books are worth reading, as I introduced the session and did the tea for 60 people. These First Friday events have rather taken off. For family reasons I can't do much of the organising of Lowdham events this year, but my Lowdham colleague Jane Streeter looks quite calm about having the programme out in a couple of weeks for our summer events. One date I have set up though is the "Lowdham Lecture" on September 20th, with Alan Gibbons talking about "Libraries, Education and Literacy". More on that nearer the time.
Meanwhile, the proof for Michael Malone's novel Blood Tears has landed on my desk. We should have finished copies next week and, so far, it looks like it will get a lot of coverage in Waterstones branches in Scotland. We had some fun proof-reading the book as our internal and external proof-reader kept trying to change Scottish rhythms into standard English. No, kiddos, they really do speak like that in the West of Scotland.
We are carrying on turning backlist into e-books and this week - announcement imminent - we have turned our out of print travel title After the Gold Rush by John Stuart Clark into an e-book, which will please the mad cyclists of America who keep asking for it.
Finally, a couple  of pieces to read. Fresh from his geographically challenging pair of readings in Inverness and Berwick, J. David Simons has been interviewed by Scottish TV about his writing. Read that here:
http://local.stv.tv/glasgow/magazine/98186-theres-no-place-like-home-for-author-j-david-simons/
And, finally, in this weekly round up, here's a set of reviews in the Newcastle Journal that brings together reviews of poetry publications by three Nottingham presses, Candlestick, Shoestring and Five Leaves, together with books published by our  friends in the north, Iron Press and Smokestack whose editors are regularly published by Five Leaves. Long live this Midlands/North East twinning! Read them here: http://tinyurl.com/cgve3ag

Notes from the frozen north # 2

It will be obvious to anyone who has spent time in Scotland, particularly around Glasgow, that the country is short of names. Many men seem to be called Jimmy and many women Hen. This lack of names clearly affects Scottish writers too. Five Leaves has five Scottish writers on its list, or coming onto its list. One is J. David Simons. That is is name but if it was just David Simons the J. would have to be added to avoid confusion with the slightly better known American writer David Simons. Russel McLean became Russel D McLean to prevent confusion with someone similar. And we now have Michael Malone from Ayr joining us, his first crime novel will be out in 2012. Unfortunately there is already a crime writer called Michael Malone so he, ie our one, will become Michael J Malone. So that's 60% of our Scottish writers needing to use an initial due to this acute name shortage. Something needs to be done. Michael Malone though will have some problems as he is already a published poet sans J. So there is now Michael Malone the crime writer, Michael Malone the poet and Michael J Malone the crime writer. Surely some enterprising literature programmer should put them all on the same bill, for an evening with Michael Malones.