Award-winning author Adrian McKinty offers a pretty amusing post on his well-traveled blog “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” about “How to write a New York Times best-selling crime novel.” McKinty has penned 12 acclaimed crime and mystery novels, including “Dead I May Well Be,” “The Dead Yard,” “Fifty Grand” and “Falling Glass.”
Depending upon your perspective, his post is either riotously funny… or snarky as hell. Among his recommendations for scribing a bestseller:
* Write about America. If you want your book to be a hit then it’s going to have to be set in America or about Americans in trouble overseas. American readers largely don’t care about the rest of the world and don’t buy books set in places they can’t easily understand.
* Move to Brooklyn Heights. Your debut novel has no chance of getting reviewed in the NYT unless you live in Manhattan or Brooklyn Heights.
* If you are a man grow a hipster goatee. If you are a woman try to be very pretty.
* Your lead character should be a rebel, but a completely safe rebel who doesn’t question the status quo.
* Have a twist a third of the way into the book and again four pages from the end. Doesn’t matter what the twist is or how ridiculous it is, this is what the punters want so this is what you must give them. Everyone will mention the twist in the review.
McKinty was born in Northern Ireland, studied at Oxford, lived and worked in New York in the early 1990s, and now resides in Melbourne, Australia with his wife and two children.
