Upward Chart Movement

Do We Ever Forget? Flatcap Shops & Scans

Upward Chart Movement

The Handshaker leapt overnight from nowhere to about number 45,000 in the Amazon rankings. It doesn’t need to sell many copies to do that.

I follow the rankings quite closely. I believe most authors do. What was significant about The Handshaker movement this morning was a similar, but much smaller jump in one of the STAC titles: My Deadly Valentine.

It’s the weakest selling STAC Mystery. The Summer Wedding Murder has only been on sale for five weeks and its already outsold Valentine, and yet, as I write, Valentine is suddenly ranked third highest behind Summer Wedding and The Filey Connection.

I hesitate to draw comparisons between My Deadly Valentine and The Handshaker. The one is a light-hearted whodunit and The Handshaker a hard-bitten, gritty novel, overcast with an increasing sense of threat.

And yet, the stories are quite similar. Both involve the central protagonist, Joe in the case of Valentine, Felix Croft in The Handshaker, personally. Both hinge upon quite brutal, serial killings. Valentine is written more like an episode of Midsomer Murders, while The Handshaker takes us deeper into the mind of a deranged killer, and both books end in a climactic confrontation.

It’s interesting to draw this kind of broad comparison. It’s not a stunt I could pull off with any regularity. Croft is, by nature, one of the world’s heroes, Joe isn’t. He’s too old and he works on the principle that most heroes are in the cemetery. That’s something Superintendent Ernie Shannon points out to Croft in the forthcoming sequel to The Handshaker, The Deep Secret. But while Joe would have listened, Croft is more likely to ignore the advice.