Soundtracks - The Killing Season

Looking back over the four books I've had published (and a fifth coming out next year), it's struck me how important music is to my writing.

That's not a huge surprise, because I love music. I'm one of those people who still has a physical CD collection, and laments the days where you could get an insight into a new friend by having a look at what albums they own. Asking to scroll through the songs on their playlist isn't really the done thing, and it's not quite the same.

I tend to listen to music without lyrics while I'm doing the writing itself - film scores, classical, jazz - but quite often I'll reference the music a character is listening to in a car, or that's playing on the jukebox in a bar. Readers have sometimes commented on the fact my books have a cinematic feel, which I take as a big compliment. Music is part of that - I like to think about the story as a movie, and what kind of music would enhance the scene.

I thought it would be fun to use this as a jumping off point for a series of blogs looking at the songs and artists I've namechecked in each book, and how I use them to set the atmosphere and comment on the story.

Since it's the first book, I thought The Killing Season would be a good place to start.

Nebraska | Bruce Springsteen




Killing Season ranges across the Midwest, taking in several states, including the one this song (and its parent album) is named after. It's one of the very best Springsteen albums. The stripped-down, mostly acoustic style creates a haunting atmosphere that's a world away from his stadium-filling anthems.

The subject matter song is appropriate for a thriller, because it's a true crime story, based on the case of teenage spree killers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, who murdered eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming in the winter of 1957/58.

Told from the point of view of the killer on Death Row, it resonated with me as I started to write the novel. One line in particular stuck out: when the narrator is asked why he did the things he did, he responds simply "there's just a meanness in this world."

I liked that so much I used it as an epigraph, although I didn't find out until later that you have to pay to do quote lyrics in a book, even just for a couple of lines.

America | Simon & Garfunkel


I've always loved this song. My mother had the Bookends LP and I'd heard it at an early age and then forgotten about it until it was used in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous.

I started writing Killing Season in January of 2010. I knew I wanted to set it against the backdrop of the big, wide-open spaces of America. The first chapter of the book is told from the point of view of a man who is a passenger, being driven across open country. I had this song in my head, as it's one of the most evocative road songs I know.

As the chapter progresses, you start to realise the character isn't a romantic drifter like the characters in the song, he's a convicted murderer being transported to his execution. But just like the characters in Paul Simon's lyrics, he ends the chapter going to look for America.

One of Us | Joan Osborne



Unlike the two previous, this song was kind of a one hit wonder, but it was utterly ubiquitous on the radio in 1995.

I've always found something enjoyably sinister about the song. It reminds me of the way some psychopaths see themselves as gods among a sheep-like mass of humanity. A serial killer is also one of us, after all.

It inspired a nice little scene around the midpoint of the book where the villain Caleb Wardell toys with a waitress who suddenly realises who she's found herself alone with.

I try to avoid quoting lyrics these days, but I like to scatter references to songs throughout the books. It helps me build the atmosphere, and hopefully it adds something for readers who are familiar with the music, or are inspired to go check it out.

• Buy The Killing Season here

• Buy 'Nebraska' by Bruce Springsteen 
• Buy 'America' by Simon and Garfunkel
• Buy 'One of Us' by Joan Osborne here

Next up, Dylan, Cornell and Young in The Samaritan.

Soundtracks blogs:

• The Killing Season
• The Samaritan
• Winterlong / The Time to Kill

Grizzly murders and the perils of quoting The Boss

I've just finished going over the final page proofs of the book, which means (to my extreme nervousness) that it's now pretty much set in stone.

One of the few advantages of not having a publishing deal before now is that I was able to write The Killing Season entirely to my own timescale. That meant I could really take my time over it and make as many changes and tweaks as I liked en route to what I amusingly believed was a final version.

Lousy coffee purchased as table rental, pencil sharpened, ready to go...

I probably went through five or six drafts before it got to the point where I was happy to send it off to Thomas, my then agent. Since then it's been through another couple of rewrites with Thomas, and a further version with Jemima, my editor at Orion. It's been read by a copyeditor and a proofreader. A bunch of my friends have read it, as well as my new agent, Luigi. All of these people have fed back on it and helped to point out the little mistakes (as well as the not-so-little ones). All in all, you'd expect that it would be polished within an inch of its life by now, but reading the page proofs over this week, I still managed to find 37 new things I decided needed changing.

This ranged from minor continuity mistakes (such as referring to a 'cold October noon' which falls at the beginning of November) to minor formatting glitches to one embarrassing spelling mistake - on page 152 I found myself writing about a 'grizzly' manner of death. Since there were definitely no bears involved, I was glad to have caught this one.

One of the final changes was to remove a number of song lyrics. Another advantage of blasting out a publisher-less novel is the fact that you operate in a bubble of blissful ignorance of things like copyright law, and specifically how it gets complicated around song lyrics. Naively, I'd assumed you could quite reasonably include a line or two from a pop song in your book and it would be covered under fair use.

Not so. Quotations from song lyrics don't work quite the same way as literary quotations. For a start, nothing from the modern era (actually since 1923 or so, which is pretty much everything, pop-music-wise) is in the public domain. There is no fair use limit, so any part of the song other than the title is copyright. And the rights may be held by more than one party (songwriter, dead songwriter's estate, publisher etc). There's an informative article on the whole thing here, summed up by the author's advice: Don't ever quote lines from pop songs.

Orion flagged this up to me at the contract stage, and kindly offered to chase down the rights-holders to see how much it would cost to use the five or six song quotes I'd blithely tossed into The Killing Season. None of them were cheap.

So part of the process this week has been to surgically remove these expensive little samples and instead try to allude to the songs without directly quoting. There was one Bruce Springsteen lyric, however, that I couldn't bear to lose. It's from the song 'Nebraska' - I quote it in the epigraph and I like how it sets the tone for the book, so I decided that one was worth keeping. It worked out something like £36 a word for a two-line quote. Given the low-fi nature of that particular album, I've probably covered the production costs all by myself.

So the typos are fixed and the song lyrics have mostly been excised and I've made a few other little nips and tucks and now that's it. The next time I see The Killing Season, it'll be in a bookshop, which is exciting and terrifying and unbelievable all at once.

Thankfully, I won't have much spare time to worry about it. I need to get my basic website looking a little less basic over Christmas, and there's also the small matter of the revisions to Carter Blake book 2: The Samaritan, which my editor has now sent me. I'm told it's already in pretty reasonable shape for a Difficult Second Novel, but this time I'm under no illusions about how many more changes there will be between now and publication day.

And no, I haven't used any Springsteen lyrics in this one.