From Custody Suite to Bestseller List: One Author's Unlikely Book Tour Stop
A Northern Irish novelist with more than five million books sold made a literary pilgrimage of a different kind
By Dexter "Box-Office" Reel
Most authors sign stock at a bookshop table with a latte going cold beside them. This one signed his in a police custody suite.
The Northern Irish author — who has sold more than five million books worldwide and been translated into 40 languages, according to the BBC — described the unconventional stop as part of a career built on going where the story is rather than where the tour schedule says it should be.
The scale of his readership is the kind most novelists only dream about: 40 languages is a translator's résumé's worth of markets, from Warsaw to Seoul, and five million copies is a number that puts him solidly in the company of the trade's reliable sellers rather than its one-hit wonders.
What the BBC's report doesn't spell out — and what we won't guess at — is which book, which case, or which custody suite prompted the signing. Those specifics weren't in the source material available to us, and rather than dress up the anecdote with invented color, we're flagging the gap for what it is: a colorful detail that needs more reporting before it earns a headline of its own.
Still, the bones of the story hold up. Authors chasing five-million-copy sales figures don't usually need gimmicks, and a custody-suite signing sounds less like a publicity stunt than an odd, genuine detour — the sort of thing that ends up as an anecdote in the author's own memoir someday.
Why it matters for the industry: in a market where publishers increasingly chase virality over craft, a writer with this kind of sustained, translated, cross-border readership is proof that word-of-mouth and backlist strength still move real numbers. The rest of the story — the who, the where, the why of that particular custody suite — is one we'll be watching for.
Loved it, hated it, or wasted my afternoon — here's which. In this case: intrigued, and waiting on the follow-up.
— Compiled from reporting by the BBC.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."