{"id":4635,"date":"2013-10-25T11:44:12","date_gmt":"2013-10-25T11:44:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=4635"},"modified":"2013-10-28T12:12:55","modified_gmt":"2013-10-28T12:12:55","slug":"wicked-game-by-adam-chase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=4635","title":{"rendered":"Wicked Game by Adam Chase"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/del>Published by Cutting Edge Press 11 July 2013<\/strong><\/p>\n

320pp, paperback, \u00a38.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Adam Chase is the pseudonym of author Eve Seymour who was \u2018outed\u2019 (by choice) at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. Here, in an exclusive article for bookoxygen<\/em> she explains why sometimes it\u2019s hard to be a woman.<\/p>\n

\u00a0*<\/p>\n

For me, writing is writing and the job of writing crime fiction has no bearing on gender, whatsoever.\u00a0 Women face exactly the same issues as men.\u00a0 Except\u2026<\/p>\n

Whenever I pick up a phone to obtain information about guns, motorbikes, helicopters, police procedure, forensics, basic politics of how certain organizations work, I often, although not exclusively, find myself conversing with a man. This has always played in my favour because, for whatever reason, men really like the idea of a woman being interested in what they consider to be traditionally masculine pursuits.\u00a0 Not once have I been told to sling my hook because \u2018you can\u2019t possibly understand; you\u2019re a woman\u2019. Perhaps it’s also because we have women reporting on issues of defence and embedded female journalists travelling with armed forces into war zones.\u00a0However, occasionally I\u2019ve come up against a disconnect between reality and what readers find acceptable when it comes to writing fiction.<\/p>\n

I once participated in a panel where I was criticized for what was deemed excessive violence in a torture scene.\u00a0 The complaint came from another woman and the general thrust was:\u00a0 \u2018You\u2019re a woman so how can you, of all people, write this stuff?\u2019\u00a0 As I tried to explain the dramatic argument and point of the scene, which cut little ice, I got the distinct impression that my gender should make me more<\/em> moral and less aggressive than my male counterparts.\u00a0 Moreover, I felt as if I\u2019d transgressed the \u2018sisterhood\u2019.<\/p>\n

On another occasion, I was asked, this time by a male radio presenter, whether I had a pint in one hand and a fag in the other, to \u2018get myself into my male characters\u2019.\u00a0 It made me laugh out loud because I thought it a bit of an own goal \u2013 no pun intended: not all guys swill beer and chug away on full-strength cigarettes, or, indeed, play football.\u00a0 When I explained I actually find it easier to crawl inside a male psyche and write from a male perspective, I was greeted with bewilderment.<\/p>\n

At a breakfast club meeting, I once gave a fifteen minute talk on what it\u2019s like to be a thriller writer, in other words a quick rundown of all the glamorous aspects rather than the hard nuts and bolts of sitting down and constructing and writing a great story.\u00a0 The assembled consisted of around forty businessmen from every field of law, commerce and industry.\u00a0\u00a0 The talk went down extremely well.\u00a0 At the end I asked for a show of hands for those who read action and adventure\/crime thrillers.\u00a0 Every hand shot up.\u00a0 When I requested a show of hands for those who would willingly pick up and read a thriller that they knew to have been written by a woman, not one hand was raised.\u00a0 Gallantly, they told me that I didn\u2019t count because I was different, presumably because I\u2019d won them over with my chat.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, is there a male\/female divide among readers? Crime fiction fans are savvy and sophisticated.\u00a0 When it comes to police procedure and forensics, they are often more knowledgeable than the average writer and can spot credibility issues at fifty paces.\u00a0 Most will be on the lookout for the killer before they have flicked through the first page.\u00a0 Violence presents little problem to the majority and, from talking to readers, I don\u2019t discern a gender split.\u00a0 As a writer, if you want to impress and woo, find some obscure forensic detail or unusual method of dispatch.\u00a0 Make no mistake, if you don\u2019t grab attention, the average crime fiction reader, male or female, will simply move onto the next novel because there are so many classy writers from whom to choose.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So what is really going on?\u00a0 Cutting to the chase, I think it comes down to sub-genre.\u00a0 While there is a long tradition of female writers who have male detectives as main protagonists, how many female writers have male action adventure heroes as the main lead, or even morally ambiguous characters like Hex, the assassin in my latest novel, Wicked Game<\/em>? Crime writer Martin Edwards, author of The Frozen Shroud,<\/em> touched on this in an article, and I think this is where an element of complexity creeps in.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception that women cannot write as convincingly and authentically as men about guns, weapons, biological, or otherwise, explosions, flying off in helicopters, tearing off on motorbikes and security service issues.\u00a0 Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of female writers who do just that extremely well:\u00a0 Meg Gardiner and Zoe Sharp, and apologies to those not included.\u00a0 However, to write this type of blood and guts, all action thriller with a male protagonist <\/em>and write it with a first person narrative definitely pushes certain \u2018you can\u2019t do that\u2019 buttons.\u00a0 Add on a male protagonist who is, essentially, a bad guy (even if he does screech to a halt in the opening scene and question his morality) you then enter the \u2018we\u2019ll never sell you as a woman\u2019 arena.\u00a0 Hence, I reckoned that if I couldn\u2019t beat my male counterparts, I\u2019d join them, which explains why I chose a male pseudonym.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And it was worth it.<\/p>\n

When five people at my publisher read Wicked Game<\/em>, nobody rumbled me. Once an interest was declared, my agent had the job of \u2018fessing up\u2019. The first response was blank amazement, the next a smile.\u00a0 They got it.\u00a0 They got the work and they got me.\u00a0 That\u2019s all you can ask for as a writer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My cover was blown the moment I participated on a panel at 2013 Cheltenham Literary Festival. So was my subterfuge a waste of time?\u00a0 I don\u2019t think so because, by adopting a male pseudonym, I\u2019m setting out my stall, conditioning the reader to expect a certain type of male action dominated novel.\u00a0 Readers can then make an open and honest choice, to move on, or to pick it up and, hopefully, enjoy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Adam Chase\/Eve Seymour<\/p>\n

Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception that women cannot write as convincingly and authentically as men about guns, weapons, biological, or otherwise, explosions, flying off in helicopters, tearing off on motorbikes and security service issues. Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of female writers who do just that extremely well: Meg Gardiner and Zoe Sharp, and apologies to those not included. However, to write this type of blood and guts, all action thriller with a male protagonist and write it with a first person narrative definitely pushes certain \u2018you can\u2019t do that\u2019 buttons […] in Author and articles<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-authors-and-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4635"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4647,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4635\/revisions\/4647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}