I thought I should hurry up and finish my posts on the Writers Festival before I couldn’t remember the details. The last session I went to was one for the boys – adventure/thriller writer, Matthew Reilly. Matthew is very popular with young men and teenage boys and the audience reflected this. It was the only session where males outnumbered females, and the average age was below 30! If you’ve read any of Matthew’s books you will know that they are fast paced, full of interesting weapons (James Bond, eat your heart out), quite a bit of head chopping and shoot them up scenes but, thankfully for us mums whose teenage sons are reading him, no sex. As Matthew says violence is big in his books, because if you are going to die, then you should die with a bang!
Matthew Reilly self published his first book, “Contest”, when he was 19 and studying for a law degree. He managed to sell 700 of them by door knocking booksellers and if you have one of these first copies with the blue cover, hold on to it – it’s worth quite a lot according to Matthew. Eventually picked up by an agent, he is now a worldwide bestselling author in his early thirties so can still relate to the audience he is writing for. The style of book he is writing is a reflection of what he liked to read as a teenager - Tom Clancy, John Grisham (the early stuff), Michael Crichton, etc. Who can forget “The Pelican Brief” or “Jurassic Park? Matthew’s objective is to write a novel which you can’t put down and makes no apology of the fast pace and cliff hanger chapter ends of his novels as he believes that if you want readers to read energetically then that’s how you have to write them. When asked about whether it was necessary for scenes to be believable, he made an interesting comment that readers will let you get away with most things if you let the reader figure it out, and I have to agree that this makes his novels more readable.
A couple of teasers he let drop: He has been commissioned to writing a movie screenplay for one his novels, “Scarecrow” and has nearly finished. If it is picked up by one of the movie studios, it could be in theatres in 2012. He has also had time to write a book aimed at older readers (i.e. those of us over 30) which will be out in October – a historical murder/mystery which will be sexier than his novels to date. Better keep the younger teenagers away from that one!
I think I have been at fault in writing off Matthew Reilly’s novels as too simplistic and not for real readers. As we get older, I believe we expect more from the books we read but there is a place for pure escapism and that is what Matthew Reilly’s books are. They are the equivalent of Robert Ludlum for today's generation of young people, complete with the technology and action that our young people expect from their entertainment. You only have to see how popular games such as “Call of Duty” for the play station 3 and Xbox are to understand why young boys and men “get” Matthew’s stories.
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