Who wasn't watching the Watchmen?

Due to the delights of Soouthern trains, my journey home was delayed and of a slightly circuitous route on Friday afternoon. After reading about and urging Aliya to suggest herself for a place as one of the writers on the Firestation Book Swap, and blogging a few weeks back about both Book Crossing, and my discovery of that weird John Le Carre book on the train, I took a seat at an intermediate station on my way home in front of the camera of David Berman, a photographer and film-maker making a piece on the Book Crossing project for the Surrey Mirror.

What this amounts to is little more than my hands may be seen reading a copy of Ian Rankin's Watchman, which David had left for me to discover on the free bench seat in front of his camera.

The book's a new-ish paperback, but I thought Rankin's introduction might prove encouraging to a few of late struggling with second (and third) book rejection and such-like.

Rankin wrote Watchman (yes, the title was inspired by Alan Moore's Watchmen, which came out not long before) after the first Rebus book had been published and at the time was in full-time employment as a journalist and with a three hour daily commute (no kidding) to contend with. He notes from his extensive diaries around the time that he was fairly certain he was about to be dropped by his publisher at the time. Watchman did get published, but it didn't set the world alight at the time at all, only to be re-published in more recent years when it became a bestseller.