This is actually an autobiography from one of the original Fifties’ ‘Angry Young Men’. Although more famous for philosophy, like his seminal New Existentialist work, The Outsider, Colin Wilson is also a writer of both crime novels and true crime.
Wilson explains how he gets the ideas for his novels and how he uses them to form his plots. He has written three detective stories. The first was Ritual in the Dark and we get a detailed commentary on the arduous process of the writing, which took eleven years between commencement and eventual publication by Gollancz.
Conversely, The Killer, one of the first psychological thrillers, was finished in just four weeks, and has recently been reissued in a magnificent, and unexpurgated, edition by Savoy Books of Manchester.
The Schoolgirl Murder Case is a police procedural, and turned out to be his last foray into crime fiction. ‘I had hoped to learn the technique of writing a detective novel in two weeks like Simenon,’ he says, ‘ but I found it bored me’
True life crime was far more interesting. He wrote a history of crime called A Casebook of Murder in two months and this led to A Criminal History of Mankind. Together with The Encyclopaedia of Murder, which he wrote with Pat Pitman, these have become invaluable reference tools.
But what makes this book so fascinating for writers, apart from the illuminating insights into the art of writing, are Wilson’s no-holds-barred accounts of his commercial dealings, his global promotion tours and lectures. He gives details about his royalties, his advances, his agent’s commission and his fees for speaking, all things most authors are reluctant to divulge but which are so helpful for the many writers who have no knowledge of the financial aspects of publishing.
Wilson’s output is prodigious. He is a world-wide authority on philosophy,
crime and the occult but, in this book, he comes across as a warm intelligent
human being who uses the story of his interesting career to expound his optimistic
philosophy of life and, in doing so, reveals what the world of the writer is
really about.
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Ron Ellis
Colin wrote a follow up police procedural novel called The Janus Murder Case
.