Lindy Cameron

People keep telling me I'm brave to start my own publishing company - at the moment. 

  Maybe I am, but I doubt there's ever a sensible time to do something this bold and adventurous. In fact crazy is a much better word for what I've embarked on; and not for the reasons those aforementioned people would think.   I mean seriously, who in their right mind would choose to be a publisher? The one person in the House who's in charge of everything; and therefore responsible for everything; and everyone. The book-voucher stops with me folks. 
   I'm responsible for: the commisioning editor, editor, proofreader, book designer, office manager, warehouse manager, book packer and sender-outer, publicity person, book-keeper, secretary, coffee-hound.
   The fact that I am all of those people means that 'as Publisher' I have a lot of selves to wrangle; while also looking after a growing Clan of awesome authors and their precious books.
   It's that very last point that sings to me though and tells me that I may well be crazy but starting Clan Destine Press is without doubt THE best decision I've ever made.
   I may be responsible, but I'm not alone. I have Capital M Minions! I have the best and most supportive partner who will one day soon be able to retire and stay home with Me and the Minions. And I launched my wild and fabulous endeavour - in November last year - with THREE books: an historical novel by the incomparable Kerry Greenwood; a cat book by the charming David Greagg; and my own adventure thriller.
  What's more I am utterly thrilled to already announce the next four books due out in June-July.

Fiction

Medea by Kerry Greenwood
Arrabella Candellarbra and the Questy Thing to End All Questy Things by A K Wrox
Scarlet Stiletto The Second Cut by winners of the annnual Scarlet Stiletto Short Story Comp run by Sisters in Crime Australia


True Crime
The Frankston Serial Killer by Vikki Petraitis.

And here endeth my first blog.
Lindy

Late last century – before every household had the Internet, DVD recorders and plasma screens, long before Facebook and YouTube, and before every teenager was iPodded and iPhoned to the wider world – I wrote a murder mystery.     While that makes me sound older than Agatha, I’m talking last century; as in, say, 13 years ago – you know when there were still phone boxes on some street corners, mobiles were the size of bricks and the only Internet was dial-up with a lot of drop-out.     So what, you might say.     Well, what I did in 1997 makes me a pioneer of the World Wide Web.     Yep, me, Lindy Cameron, Australian crime writer – an Internet Pioneer. And I deserve those capital letters, because I really did boldly go where none had gone before.

    Without actually sticking a Lindy-flag in an intersection of the old Information Superhighway, I believe I was the first person in the world to be commissioned to write fiction specifically for publication on the World Wide Web.

    Three years before the turn of the Millennium – and prior to the hilarious Y2K non-event – I was paid actual money to write a novel for this new-fangled thing that, in terms of home-use, was more un than usual. Seriously, ‘way back then’ surfing the net was kind of like taking a kick-board into a widdle wave pool.

    Back then! Ha! I know teenagers who are now older than the then-Wonder of Internet surfing…from home.

    But, back to me.

    In those near-Dark Ages, I was commissioned by the Museum of Victoria to write a novel to help promote Melbourne and its museums in the lead-up to ICOM ’98 – the most important international gathering of museologists, museum professionals and other learned types that Australia had ever seen.

    The  Triennial Conference of the International Council of Museums (whose HQ is in Paris) is a really big deal. In the museum world, scoring the hosting of this prestigious conference is akin to a city hosting the Olympics.

    In 1998 the honour went to Melbourne, Victoria. It was the first time the conference had been held in Australia and only the second time it had travelled south of the equator.

    Despite the seriously high-profile nature of the thing, some wacky person on the Melbourne ICOM committee decided that a ‘novel’ way to let all the potential delegates – museum folk from all over the world – know about ‘our part’ of the world was to commission a murder mystery.

    True. 

    The ICOM ’98 committee approached Sisters in Crime Australia looking for some likely writers to submit ideas for a murder mystery set in the Melbourne Museum but focusing on the conference’s 1998 theme of the repatriation of cultural artefacts.

    That’s where I came into it – although there were four of us to start with.

    Four excited, but bemused, crime writers turned up for a briefing session to face a boardroom full of semi-informed museum staff. That was the funniest part. Some of these folk – these professionals from various departments of the Museum – learnt of the ‘murder mystery PR concept’ at that same meeting. And many of them looked horrified at the thought of using a murder mystery to promote their professions, their institution and their city – to the international museum community.

    By the end of the session however, they had not only warmed to the idea, but were suggesting likely candidates and telling us just how, and why he, she or they should be bumped-off.

    We writers left with our brief. We came up with our individual story ideas and submitted them to the ICOM committee for selection.

    And I got the job.    Me.

    I got this incredibly cool opportunity. And it still amazes me.

    Why? Mostly because of who I was back then. But also because – from the comfort of this end of the first decade the 21st century – both the Internet and I have come so far in that short time that I realise just how totally awesome what I did was. For then.

    So, who was I then? Nobody, that’s who.

    I was an unpublished crime writer whose knowledge of, and love for, museums was limited to visiting them. While Blood Guilt, my first-written crime novel, had been accepted by HarperCollins Australia it was not due out until early1999.

    But, in 1997 a public institution commissioned me to make up a story, titled Stolen Property, to help promote their conference.

    Their International Conference.

    On their website.

    On the Internet.

    What I did predated Stephen King’s pay-as-you-get-it serial foray of the year 2000. The bonus with Stolen Property was that, because I was commissioned to write it, readers got the whole book – all of it – over a 10 month period, for free.

    Yeah, yeah – all you teenagers out there who don’t remember a time before Facebook, and you Gen-Other-Things who barely recall video cassettes – we know that happens all the time now. But a mere 13 years ago this was not usual.

    When Stolen Property went up on the ICOM ’98 website, personal computers were still newish, and the proverbial ‘they’ were still talking about a time when ‘one in four homes’ might eventually have PCs; when one in 20 might get, not have, ‘get’ dial-up internet.

    This was the olden days.

    So much so, that even though the whole reason for me writing the story in the first place was to promote a conference through the conference’s own website, I had to do most of my book’s research at libraries. As in physically leave home and walk into a library building, search for actual books and borrow them.

    Why? Because in the late 90s there still weren’t that many ‘websites’ you could just go visit to get your facts.

    This was 1997 BG – Before Google.

    Even in a novel designed for serialisation on the Internet, I made few references to the Internet itself, because it was technology so ‘new’ to me, and most people I knew, that I could not even ‘guess’ where it would be in six months – let alone the following year when Stolen Property went ‘online’.

    There were a few other odd things I had to tackle in the writing of Stolen Property that were a twist on the skills we writers use everyday.

    First, I had three months to complete the project. Three months! It was just as well my proposal had been really detailed. Ten chapters; 80,000 words; three months. Ha!

    Second, I had to make stuff up, based on fact.

    We do that all the time, I know. But I had to create an intriguing mystery, accessible to all/any readers, while avoiding telling granny how to suck eggs – or in this case without bashing the museologists about their own stuff, in order to ‘explain’ it to readers who were less in-the-know. Readers who were, in fact, more like me.

    One of the reasons for this concern was that when HarperCollins, my soon-to-be first-time publishers, learnt of what I was doing for ICOM ’98, they came up with an incredibly awesome plan. They would publish the end result of my serialised mystery as an actual paperback. In time for the opening of the actual ICOM Conference in 1998. This book would actually come out before the one I had already contracted with them.

    Hence my desire to make Stolen Property a novel for a much wider readership than the online international museum community. (Like they weren’t enough!)

    Another aspect of having to make things up, based on fact, was a couple of minor real-world details.

    When I started writing Stolen Property in 1997 the (old) Museum of Victoria was still in Swanston Street with the State Library of Victoria.

    Stolen Property, however, was set a year later, between September and October 1998 when – if things went according to plan – the Museum as we had known it for 150 years would be closed to the public. Its curators and staff would be working to finish the packing, for storage, of the entire humongous collection – in preparation for the opening of the new museum sometime in 2000.

    When I started writing in ’97, the space beside the famous Royal Exhibition Building in the Carlton Gardens was just that, space – lawn and trees and space.

    When my hero Sam Diamond stands there, in what was my future but the book’s present, I had to imagine what she might be seeing – a year later in real time and in the midst of three or so years’ work on a huge construction site. Confused yet?

    Would Sam see half-dug foundations for a mighty new museum? Would part of the building itself be up? Or would ‘the site’ still be lovely lawn and trees, because something had gone awfully wrong and not a single sod had yet been turned?

    It was part of my brief to talk up Melbourne; introduce our city as great place, in its own right, for the conference delegates to visit, to enjoy, to look at. But what if I couldn’t get that little detail about the new museum right? No pressure at all. None. Nada.

    Not to mention having to rabbit on about museums, and museum practice, and how it was all changing, and the whole repatriation of cultural artefacts concept, and… all for the ‘entertainment’ of people who chatted about such things over coffee. Did I mention, no pressure.

    Righto. Blah-blah-blah, Lindy. I had the best time. Of course I did.

    The serialisation of Stolen Property on the ICOM ’98 website between February and October of 1998 did exactly what it was supposed to do. HarperCollins Australia published my story as a paperback in October 1998. Retitled Golden Relic my book was launched on the opening night of the ICOM ’98 Conference.

    Yay, go me!

    You may wonder why am I telling you all this; apart from the whole waving my Internet Pioneer flag thing.

    Well, Golden Relic as a paperback has been out of print for while now. In fact it is so hard to get hold of that second-hand copies are being offered via eBay and some online booksellers for $90 to $300!

    While I am beyond-flattered by this turn of events, I’ve decided it’s time to bring my little murder mystery full circle back to a wider audience. Back to the Internet.

    Stolen Property, the serialised internet novel, which became Golden Relic the paperback, is now returning as Golden Relic the ebook.

    For a mere $8 you can now own a copy of a book that not only stands proudly as a quirky bit of Internet History, but is also a rollicking good yarn – if I do say so myself.

    It’s the first in the Sam Diamond / Maggie Tremaine archaeological mystery series. And there will be more.

    Golden Relic, published by Clan Destine Press, is now available online in a variety of formats for a variety of e-readers from the Clan Destine Book & Author Portal.

One last thing about the actual paperback. And this is perhaps something only other authors will truly appreciate. But the day that I received my advance copies of Golden Relic in the mail had it’s own spooky coincidence. Apart from the sheer thrill of opening the parcel, taking out my first published book, smelling it, fondling it, going all wackadoo about holding a real novel with my name on the cover and filled with pages of words that I had put into the right order… Um, as I said, apart from all that, that ‘day’ was also significant.

    Remember, I wrote the thing the year before, in 1997. Allowing for the fact that I was actually using the real conference as a backdrop to the mystery, and that I wanted to have the denouement of that mystery happening at the official opening of ICOM ’98 (well, my fictional version of that opening, obviously) I had a timeline that my characters had to meet. I was also writing a serial – so I needed a lot of ‘racing around’ and end of chapter cliffhangers.

    So I set up my plot, then worked the timeline backwards from the real official opening date of the real conference, and then picked a day/date at random to start the mystery.

    A murder in the Melbourne Museum launches Special Detective Sam Diamond and archaeologist Dr Maggie Tremaine off on an adventure around the world and back to Melbourne – in time for the October 10 opening of the ICOM ’98 conference.

    That random start date – which I chose back in about July of ’97 – was Wednesday September 16, 1998.

    On that day, in fiction, Professor Lloyd Marsden of the Museum of Victoria was found murdered in the old museum.

    On that date in the real world – 18 months after it was plucked from the air – I, Lindy Cameron received her advance copy of Golden Relic.

    Yes –  do-do-de-do – on Wednesday 16 September 1998, I opened my first-published novel, for the first time, and read:

Chapter One

Melbourne, Wednesday September 16, 1998

The hands tore at Professor Lloyd Marden’s flesh with a surprising savagery. It was hardly fair, he thought, that in his last moments of life he was also being tormented by a gathering of avenging gods…

You all know what to do now - Golden Relic
 

Ever had one of those days where you just want to ring someone’s neck; shove some hissy-fitting fool further over their own precarious edge; beam a tailgating driver three paddocks left and into the middle of a dam; or burn the office down so there’s a really good reason not to go into work tomorrow?

Have you? I mean, let’s face it, sometimes a good talking to is just not enough; being all lady-like is, well, impossible; being polite is uncalled for; and being civilised simply gets you nowhere.

Why? Because it’s a sad but undeniable truth that some people really are barbarians, and some barbarians really do deserve your worst.

What do you do though, if you’re too nice to reveal your righteous indignation through an actual murderous act? What if it just isn’t in you to execute an intricate and diabolical, but deathless, form of delicious retribution?

Or what if you’re not – nice, I mean - but you are worried about getting caught? What if you’re creative and imaginative, but not daring and foolhardy?

Well, how about this for an idea? You could try getting rid of your barbarian-induced stress, aggro, latent homicidal tendencies or desire for revenge, by writing down how you’d deal with their transgression and, more importantly, how you’d serve up their just deserts.

Oh, hello! I don’t mean write how you’re going to do it! (The cops can use that in court against you, silly.) I’m not advocating violence here; I am suggesting crime fiction.

Think about it. If you write about your perfect murder or profitable blackmail scheme then you get to detail the bitch’s downfall or the bastard’s comeuppance - and get it out of your system.

Just imagine dealing - fairly and justly of course - but in no uncertain terms with your boss or
brown-nosing colleague. You take revenge  – over and over again – on your therapist or landlord; your ex-lover or her car, or her new lover; your skinny dietician or personal trainer; or that bank manager, who wouldn’t lend you money for the Xena Carribbean Cruise (yes there was one).

The list of potentials is endless, and in crime fiction all these villains can be taken apart - lovely limb from lovely limb - and no one will put you in jail. (Do remember to change their names.)

And if your hormones are screaming for justice, not revenge? Again I say: write it down.

In crime fiction you can seek and achieve justice, equity or some kind of resolution for all the irritating things that make life messy. You can fictionally turn the tables on all members of Bastards Incorporated: on the ones with whom you’ve actually had contact; and on those you’d never be able to reach in real life.

You can, for instance: kidnap lying politicians and hold them for a truth ransom; detain an immigration minister in your outdoor dunny for as long as you like, and just for the hell of it; or re-educate the wankers who use rap-dancing boys to advertise colour-coded tampons. You could beam all those TV journos who persist in talking about those dangerous ‘terrasts’ – you know the ones threatening world peace – to the same dam as those tailgating drivers, and leave them (the reporters not the terrorists) there until they learn how to e-nunc-i-ate.

Crimes and injustices – big and small, real and imagined, serious or humorous, can all be dealt with in crime fiction. Order out of chaos – that’s what it’s all about. You can bring reason to the madness, offer power to the underdog and strength to the disadvantaged.

I write crime fiction for a living (oh ha, very funny). I write crime fiction. It’s my genre of choice because there may be blood and bruises, death and drama, mad bombers, serial killers, thieves, politicians, psychopaths, kidnappers, ransom demands, car chases and, quite often, challenging, thought-provoking and thoroughly contemporary social issues – but everything always works out right in the end. That is the point of it. It’s not simply the ‘who’ but the ‘why’; it’s not the mystery itself but the solution that matters.

So far I’ve written, and had published, four crime novels and an espionage thriller. Three of these Blood Guilt, Bleeding Hearts and Thicker Than Water feature Melbourne Private Investigator, Kit O’Malley; my archaeological mystery Golden Relic, follows the adventures of the female sleuthing team of Detective Sam Diamond and archaeologist Dr Maggie Tremaine; and Redback, features Retrieval Agent, Commander Bryn Gideon.

I highly recommend the healing art of writing crime. The next best thing, of course, is reading crime fiction, which I do on a regular basis. And then there’s talking about it which, as a national co-convenor of Sisters in Crime Australia, I get to do a lot. Ah, then there’s writing about writing about it. It just goes on and on and mysteriously on. Some things are simply too good to be true.