DAVID BARRIE
Wednesday, 11th January 2012. On titles (again).
A rose by any other name may indeed smell as sweet, but I do wonder whether it's always true of books. Gatsby may be acceptable shorthand for The Great Gatsby, but it would have been a pity if the tale had been published with such a truncated title. True, few works of crime fiction have particularly memorable titles more often than not, they're simply used as a branding mechanism for individual authors (A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar ... not to mention the Word-Worded pattern used on my own) but I do sometimes wonder about the effect of a title on the mindset of the reader.
Thus far, this has not been a great concern as regards my own books. Wasp-Waisted and Night-Scented are non-significant titles they just recycle a central object in each tale (a magazine and a perfume, respectively) as an anchor for the whole. Loose-Limbed, although an apparently accidental title (the word occurs but once, as an aside, in the story), is nonetheless intended to serve as a reminder, once you've finished the book, of what was behind the series of crimes. This time around, however, there was a long, drawn-out debate about the most fitting title for the fourth Franck Guerin novel. The final shortlist pitted Ill-Matched against Hard-Hearted, with the latter emerging victorious. Each highlighted different aspects of the intrigue and I suspect that the final choice may indeed lead readers to pay more attention to certain aspects of the story than they might otherwise have done. And I've already spotted one trickle-down effect the blurb that currently features on the publisher's draft cover for the UK edition clearly sets out to reinforce the focus already provided by the title.
So just in case anyone's wondering the title did not sow the seed of the story (which is what happened with Loose-Limbed). Up until its final days, the manuscript's only identifying feature was the easily deciphered code FG4.
A rose by any other name may indeed smell as sweet, but I do wonder whether it's always true of books. Gatsby may be acceptable shorthand for The Great Gatsby, but it would have been a pity if the tale had been published with such a truncated title. True, few works of crime fiction have particularly memorable titles more often than not, they're simply used as a branding mechanism for individual authors (A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar ... not to mention the Word-Worded pattern used on my own) but I do sometimes wonder about the effect of a title on the mindset of the reader.
Thus far, this has not been a great concern as regards my own books. Wasp-Waisted and Night-Scented are non-significant titles they just recycle a central object in each tale (a magazine and a perfume, respectively) as an anchor for the whole. Loose-Limbed, although an apparently accidental title (the word occurs but once, as an aside, in the story), is nonetheless intended to serve as a reminder, once you've finished the book, of what was behind the series of crimes. This time around, however, there was a long, drawn-out debate about the most fitting title for the fourth Franck Guerin novel. The final shortlist pitted Ill-Matched against Hard-Hearted, with the latter emerging victorious. Each highlighted different aspects of the intrigue and I suspect that the final choice may indeed lead readers to pay more attention to certain aspects of the story than they might otherwise have done. And I've already spotted one trickle-down effect the blurb that currently features on the publisher's draft cover for the UK edition clearly sets out to reinforce the focus already provided by the title.
So just in case anyone's wondering the title did not sow the seed of the story (which is what happened with Loose-Limbed). Up until its final days, the manuscript's only identifying feature was the easily deciphered code FG4.