Whitbread award winning author Joan Brady has won her long-running battle against a shoe manufacturing company on the grounds that toxic fumes affected her ability to work, and while I think it's great she won, the subtext, as reported by the Times, makes me a bit put out:
A prize-winning novelist has won a settlement of more than £100,000 after she claimed to have become so intoxicated by fumes from a nearby shoe factory that she was reduced to writing thrillers.
Joan Brady, who beat Andrew Motion and Carol Anne Duffy to win the Whitbread Prize in 1993 with her book The Theory of War, has received £115,000 in an out-of-court settlement after she suffered numbness in her hands and legs allegedly caused by solvents used by Conker, a cobbler based next to her home in Totnes, Devon.
She told The Times that the fumes were so bad that she was unable to concentrate on writing her highbrow novel, Cool Wind from the Future, and instead wrote a brutal crime story, Bleedout, which she found easier. The violent plot of the book also allowed her to vent her frustrations on the factory and South Hams District Council, which failed initially to detect the smells. According to Nielsen Book-scan, Bleedout has sold a respectable 10,000 copies.
I reviewed BLEEDOUT when it came out in the US about three years ago and liked it well enough. But the whiff of snobbery seems all the more unseemly since Brady's working on a sequel to the book at the moment.
UPDATE: The Guardian's Mark Lawson tackles this very subject.
As if people needed more convincing that we thriller writers are all inhaling something...
Posted by: Thomas Lakeman | January 24, 2008 at 01:28 PM
Based on that, can I sue the makers of Bass Ale for fogging my mind and making me go with a financially unstable publisher in 2004 instead of letting the nice agent lady send me over to St. Martin's instead?
Because I'm about to become single again, and the $100K would help with the settlement nicely.
And buy a lot of Harp's.
Posted by: Jim Winter | January 24, 2008 at 01:56 PM
Sounds more like the fumes unlocked her imagination enough to actually be able to come up with a plot.
Think I will stop and pick up a can of Kiwi on the way home tonight.
Posted by: Doug Riddle | January 24, 2008 at 03:22 PM
CASHOUT!
Posted by: Jonathan Hayes | January 24, 2008 at 04:40 PM
That was the best laugh of the day.
Posted by: Ingrid (I.J.Parker) | January 24, 2008 at 04:51 PM
Words fail me. But that is probably because I have been standing in front of my microwave with the door open.
Posted by: PJ Parrish | January 24, 2008 at 07:56 PM
I was in the aforementioned town of Totnes, Devon yesterday wearing a pair of Conker's shoes!
Usually the only smell one can detect in Totnes is that of a burning medicinal herb wafting over the local eccentrics.
Nothing about Totnes would surprise me.....
Posted by: Norm | January 25, 2008 at 10:15 AM
I've been a fan of Brady's since THE UNMAKING OF A DANCER, her memoir of dancing for Balanchine. Part of her appeal to me is that she's always sounded a bit-- how to put it? Jacked up or angry or something. It doesn't surprise me to hear her belittling genre fiction because she did pretty much the same thing with ballet. I'd like to have a few drinks with her, though.
Posted by: Naomi Darvell | January 25, 2008 at 11:25 AM
"reduced to writing thrillers." That's one to hang over my desk.
Posted by: Clea Simon | January 25, 2008 at 11:36 AM
I have just read than brady is American. Somehow, I am not surprised. In fact, as with the Swedish dwarves, I am not entirely convinced that this is not a hoax or a publicity stunt.
==============
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Peter | January 26, 2008 at 05:31 AM
P.S. I have also been to Totnes. Any suggestions as to whom I can sue ... and for what?
==============
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Peter | January 26, 2008 at 05:32 AM
Maybe that shoe manufacturer has a plant round the corner from Inger Wolfe's house.
Posted by: Helen Heller | January 26, 2008 at 10:02 AM
I've been through Totnes, but I didn't inhale.
Damn.
Posted by: Cornelia Read | January 26, 2008 at 04:48 PM
"reduced to writing thrillers."
Bullshit.
I've been trying to plot my thriller lately and have thought may times how much easier it would be to write a "high brow" novel.
Posted by: Bryon Quertermous | January 26, 2008 at 05:02 PM
Joan Brady, Didn't she get pulled up for heavy plagiarism for her 1993 Whitehead effort!Nobody likes a fraud
Posted by: Dan | January 27, 2008 at 08:42 AM
I note that none of the offending statements have quotation marks around them. Are we sure that she actually said those things or is the "highbrow" versus thrillers bit just the slant that the writer of the article put on her words? I read another account in which Brady was quoted as saying that the situation provoked her to write her thriller because it made her so angry and that anger was fuel for a different kind of book than the one she had been writing. That connects the two in plausible fashion without any denigration of genre. As a keen reader of good literary fiction AND good crime fiction (and various combinations and permutations thereof), I hate to see them once again unnecessarily pitted against one another (whether by Brady or the Times or anyone else).
Posted by: Kate S. | January 27, 2008 at 09:06 AM
There is just never a good time to stop sniffing glue.
Posted by: David Thayer | January 27, 2008 at 07:12 PM
Since in a 2005 interview Brady herself describes the books previous to BLEEDOUT as thrillers that ended up being marketed as literary fiction, I'm not sure what she's getting at here.
http://www.shotsmag.co.uk/interviews2005/joan_brady/j_brady.html
Oh wait: the mass market paperback of BLEEDOUT is being published by Pocket on the 29th of January. What a funny coincidence.
Posted by: Linda L. Richards | January 27, 2008 at 09:22 PM