The first five pages: DIAMOND READER
Jessie Keane, the queen of gangland crime writing, gives us an in-depth look at the opening pages of her new crime thriller, Diamond
Jessie Keane
Inever actually set out to write an historical crime thriller when I started dreaming up Diamond. I knew I loved the Peaky Blinders series on TV, I knew I loved writing crime, and I was just reading through some of the details of the Queen Mother’s wedding when I spied a bridesmaid with the name of Diamond. I had a brandnew publisher who was open to ideas, and so I outlined a big epic book for her which starred Diamond Butcher (who would become Diamond Dupree), a strong, independent girl brought up on the wrong side of the tracks and forced into living a life of crime at the end of the first World War, a girl who would be raised in London, grow to womanhood and be made famous in Paris, and who would probably get into some ghastly (and entertaining) scrapes along the way.
Now, the first five pages. When I send a new book to my publisher, I have already rewritten my first whole draft five times. I have beefed about this a lot on Facebook, so I won’t bore you with it here. Suffice it to say, you start off in love with your book, and by the end of those five rewrites, you sort of hate it. But it’s necessary grunt-work stuff, those rewrites. And the first five pages are the most crucial of all, getting the book off to a flying start, setting the scene, introducing your main characters, drawing your reader in so that they can’t stop reading. That’s the page-turner element at play, right there. And here is how to achieve it.