Over the past year, the burgeoning popularity of ebooks has meant that I have been able to widen my audience a hundredfold. The greatest success that I have had has been with my series of crime novels set in Cork, in Ireland, starting with White Bones and followed up by Broken Angels and Red Light.
White Bones sold 143,000 copies in Amazon Kindle in its first month of publication and Broken Angels was still in the top four of crime and mystery novels four months after its release.
Because these are classified as crime novels, I have also been able to appeal to readers who normally shy away from the horror genre. I very much hope, though, that those who enjoy my horror novels will derive as much gory enjoyment from the crime novels as they do from the out-and-out supernatural horror stories.
I have not shied away from explicit descriptions of what terrible things people can do to each other, and in fact I believe that novels about murder should not be euphemistic. Several reviewers have said that they found the novels too graphic and were unable to finish reading them because of that, but I don't wrote Agatha Christie-type crime novels about the bishop being battered to death by a badger in the bathroom.
One key to the crime novels' success I think is the heroine, Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire, of An Garda Siochána, the Irish police force, in Cork City. The books deal not only with her crime-solving, but with her personal life as well, which is very mixed up, and also with her constant conflict with fellow officers who are resentful of a woman being promoted to such a high position. (In real life, the Deputy Commissioner of An Garda Siochana is a woman.)
I have returned to disaster novels, another genre I thoroughly enjoy writing, with Drought, a belated follow-up to Plague and Famine. I originally conceived this novel almost twenty years ago, but my editor at Simon & Schuster left the company and none of the other editors were keen to take it on, so I shelved it.
Now that California has been stricken by a real drought, I decided to revive my novel, although I had to make the drought far worse than my original concept in order to match the disaster that is faced by American farmers because it hasn't rained for so long.
Also coming up is a new Manitou novel., final title yet to be decided. I very much wanted to revive Harry Erskine, and there is a real crisis happening in American hotels that I was keen to comment on.
My books have been selling tremendously well in Poland, and I visited Poland three times in 2013 ... to Poznan in March for the Pyrkon fantasy festival, to Krakow in July for Krakon, and to Warsaw in September to attend the wedding of Marysia Raczkowska, who helped me to write
Community after the passing of my wife Wiescka in 2011. Marysia is now Mrs Pstragowska and I am very happy for her.
This year I shall be attending the CrimeFest crime convention in Bristol between May 15 - 18 and also the Krakow Book Fair in October.
As far as the immediate future is concerned, I have been commissioned by Head of Zeus my UK publishers to write another Katie Maguire novel but I am planning to write an extremely scary novel which I hope will make it impossible for anybody who reads it to sleep for a week!
Graham Masterton
February, 2014
Earlier letters:
Letters from Ireland, April 2012
Letters from Ireland, July 2007
Letters from Ireland, December 2003
Letters from Ireland, January 2002
Letters from Ireland, July 2000
Letters from Ireland, February 2000
AGENT: My agent is Camilla Shestopal at Peters Fraser & Dunlop agency, email c.shestopal@pfd.co.uk
Fan mail to Graham Masterton: manitouman1@yahoo.com
