About the Reviewer: Melissa Weatherill worked for literary superagent Ed Victor before becoming an editor at Simon & Schuster where she worked for five years on women's fiction, literary fiction, crime and thriller. She commissioned, edited and published authors such as Jules Hardy, Annabel Dilke and Kate O'Riordan, and worked closely with many others including Adriana Trigiani, Will Rhode, Victoria Glendinning, Jennifer Weiner and Kathy Lette. She is now an independent editor and reviewer for books and film, freelance editing fiction and non-fiction for publishing house including Macmillan, Orion, Hodder and Grove Atlantic. Melissa also assesses books and screenplays for film companies such as BBC films.





Professional critique for THE HATRED OF FRIENDS by Carl Plummer



Congratulations on being selected for this month's bestseller chart. I enjoyed the beginning of Jack Mulberry's latest investigation, as did many of your fellow YouWriteOn members.



Plot and structure:

It's great that you have a clear idea of what you are writing, and who you are writing it for. You obviously read a great deal of crime yourself and perhaps prefer the more old school crime writers – a crucial part of the process of getting published is having a realistic awareness of your writing, and it is exactly the kind of thing agents, etc. look for in submissions and pitches. They like to be told in a nutshell what they are dealing with and whether it's worth their while pursuing it or even reading it.



Creating a series with ongoing characters is a really good way of practising and developing your creative writing… using the same characters means you get to know them intimately and I believe it shows in your portrayal of Mulberry in these pages. But I will talk about characterisation in the next section.



It's hard to judge how your plot hangs together from these initial chapters, as they serve more as a setup for character and setting. Judging however from your synopsis, your story appears to be quite convoluted, not to mention intriguing. However, it's not very clear what the primary focus should be. There seem to be quite a few subplots, twists and turns, as well as many characters and quite a broad setting... and I wonder if your narrative would benefit from being simplified a bit? It's tempting to cram in as much as possible, especially in this kind of high-paced writing, but I always believe that less is more. For instance, maybe having four main characters investigating the crime (when Mulberry and Calvert team up Briard and Chapon) is a little too many, but again, I'll deal with that more in the next section.



Chapter one is a very strong and intriguing chapter, yet it introduces two (rather mysterious) characters who aren't included in the synopsis, so it's hard to see how they fit into the bigger picture. Perhaps it is slightly misleading in that it seems to portray Pierre Marechal as the protagonist of the piece who is on some vigilante/revenge campaign, yet I can't see how that fits into the investigation Mulberry is involved in. I'm sure it all comes out in the fullness of the manuscript, but I just wanted to convey my interest in it and my hope that it is a subplot which is fully developed and explored.



I'll discuss tension, narrative drive and pace later on, but I think you could condense these opening chapters a little bit so that there is less space dedicated to introducing the characters, less conjecture and speculation, and more action. As you will know, the first twenty pages or so of a book are the most important in hooking the reader. By the end of these 24 pages however, I felt not enough had happened for me to want to keep reading.



But I did want to know whether the feelings Mulberry has when he meets the victim's granddaughter come to anything? Or is the element of romance in the book limited to that between Calvert and Chapon?



Character and voice:

As a crime novel, your narrative lends itself much more to being plot-led than voice-led, however, voice is equally key in making it the slick, gripping, engaging narrative it should be. And it is Mulberry's voice which is presented in these opening pages as the predominant voice driving the narrative forward, i.e. it's mainly his story, his experience, his take on things which guide us through the investigation. However, there are quite a few other key characters with stories of their own and it's rather confusing to tell whose is more important. For the sake of simplicity and so as not to demand too much of the reader, I would focus mainly on one character, really exploring and developing that person and by no means taking the voices away from the other characters, but maybe ordering them into some kind of hierarchy. As it's written in the third person, there is of course more scope for narratorial authority, but it helps to have it very clear from the start whose story it is.



Maybe you are able to cut a couple of the characters without any detrimental effect to the overall story? It is hard to do, but it's an essential part of the editing process: stripping the narrative right back and working out what has an essential role and what can go, from characters to plotlines to scenes.



So, going back to Mulberry: from what I have read, I rather like him as the cynical, jaded, world-weary detective. However, it would be helpful to the new reader to give a little more background information about him – his past, personal life, his retirement. I was especially intrigued to know why he harbours such animosity towards Enderby. This is the tricky thing about series: you need to strike the right balance between including enough information for the new reader, but not too much to bore the reader who has read the previous instalments. Either way, each book should be able to stand on its own as a crime novel in its own right, and it's not easy to do well!



As for the rest of them, you have a colourful cast of characters (savoury and otherwise!), well portrayed with apt names and characteristics, but the synopsis is slightly alarming in terms of the large number of them it throws at you in a short space of time. Be careful of overpopulating your novel – as I say, it really pays to be brutally self-disciplined in the editing process and getting rid of extraneous characters or sub-plotlines.



Writing style:

I think you write well, with a natural and engaging turn of phrase, but at the moment, judging by these opening chapters, it is a little on the slow side. I mentioned pace and narrative drive already, and in a novel of this ilk, pace is crucial. At the moment, there is a little too much conjecture, too many asides, which interrupt the narrative and hinder the flow and momentum of the story, especially in passages of dialogue. For instance, a few too many times, Mulberry's asides or thoughts interrupt the dialogue and make for quite a staccato read. Yes, it is important for the reader to gain insight into his thoughts and feelings, but it isn't always appropriate to have a thought following hot on the heels of a sentence said out loud. For instance, on page 9, para 8, he continues his conversation internally which jars a little. In small doses, it can be very effective and immediate, but I would cut most of them.



In fact, a few of the other characters are also prone to the same habit (e.g Guy Leclerc on page 3) but be careful of using the same techniques on different characters as there is a risk of all the voices sounding the same.



Sometimes the clever banter between Enderby and Mulberry feels a little contrived, and the unfinished sentences (see page 21 for instance) feel a little jolting when used too many times.



In short, I think you write very well, which is half the battle when it comes to getting noticed. The other half is the commercial viability of your novel, which I'll come on to in my final analysis.



Final Analysis:

Crime fiction continues to be very popular, but it is also a very competitive area of the commercial fiction market. Only very exceptional and original new writing has a chance against the likes of the stalwart bestsellers. Therefore I would warn against writing something too derivative. As much as it has some excellent ingredients, there is something a little familiar about your novel that I don't think this is the one to propel you into the spotlight of the publishing world. But these things take time and endless drafts, so I applaud your desire to receive feedback and I hope that this brief bit of advice will help you take your writing to the next level.



Do keep writing, keep practising and keep enjoying it. I wish you lots of luck and I thank you for an enjoyable read.