The List is a monthly round-up of music, movies, books, vibes, and oddities. There’s no structure or hierarchy. If you’re new to the to list, this is coming to you from crime novelist IAIN RYAN and he says hello.
The Collapse by Iain Ryan
The Agency (TV series) Was Always Good
Frank Miller’s Push The Wall
Lord of the Overstock
Fuck Your Novella
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It took 18 months and nearly killed me, but I have completed the first draft of the fourth Gold Coast book. The working title is The Collpase.
This novel will be out sometime in 2027 and will the final entry in my Gold Coast Quartet, for the time being.
But who knows. I reserve the right to spin this series off into a Quintet or a Sextet, or whatever comes after 6 books. I can only promise you this much: the Quartet, as it currently stands, is a full story arc that resolves fairly cleanly. If I add further entries, these would be standalone novels.
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I think the culture is about to retcon Paramont’s The Agency. For Season 1, the critics were brutal, apparently bewildered that a show could feature Michael Fassbender, Jeffery Wright, and Richard Gere, and still be ‘boring’ and ‘slow.’
Basic.
Now that the audience is showing up, what do you know, the critics are falling into line for Season 2.
What I watched, from the outset, was a beautifully photographed crime drama that touched on le Carré and Graham Greene. Situating the story in the CIA field office in London drags in all the tropes of colonial entropy often restating them, but also gently suggesting that the US is headed the same way. Sure, listening to Richard Gere haggle with his agents about budgets and resourcing isn’t as immediately entertaining as —I dunno, Jackson Lamb ripping an audible fart in Slow Horses— but this type of spy story is absolutely in my lane. What I tune in with this stuff is to watch characters destroy themselves by living outside of society’s code.
There’s plenty of that here.
The Agency goes directly into the grey morass and it’s excellent.
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In Australia, it’s going to be months before a reasonably priced edition of Frank Miller’s memoir Push The Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling becomes available. The Kindle Edition is $28 AUD ($20 USD) at the moment, obvious price gouging designed to push readers into pre-ordering the physical edition over here.
Or so one would think, except that the full audible book, read by Miller, is already available on Spotify Premium in Australia.
I’m enjoying it so far. Miller is an acquired taste, and I’ve had more than fair share of New York stories, but I was always going to read this. The man’s comics are a huge part of my whole aesthetic.
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I have a range of things back in stock on my website www.iainryan.com.
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My approach to social media has always been pretty off the cuff. I don’t mind people who are more strategic and organised —and I sometimes go through phases of being more on it— but I certainly can’t perform online with any sort of consistency. Not for free, anyhow.
The other day, I posted this relatively inane Note:
And Substack responded, because Substack is full of emerging writers who are trying to break out with a novella. Why? Because writing a novella is significantly easier than writing a 70,000 word novel — which is a pain in the arse.
I cannot be fucked arguing one-on-one over some glorified tweet that I banged out on my phone at work, but…
I’m 100% right about this.
No one wants your novella.
What do people want? Your book.
Matt Sini pointed this out. The Broken River Books dudes sell books (some of which are novellas). Kelby Losack made his name selling 10K word short stories as books, like the hustler that he is. That’s the equivalent of selling loosies at the bar for a premium. All novella-writers need a bit of this vibe, whether you like it or not.
So this is the lesson I want you to take on board:
Don’t be meek. The novella has small dick energy. It’s literary-coded as less-than. Your readers want to give their attention to the brave, the weird, the excellent, and the outrageous. So don’t be coming in here screaming to everyone that you’ve done half a thing. No one cares.
The very least you can do is lie.
Buy my books in stores everywhere or here, or on Amazon if you’re overseas.
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