<a href="http://davidhewson.com/books/standalones/death-in-seville/" target="_self"><em><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-6148" title="death-in-seville" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/death-in-seville-pbb-r6.jpg" alt="" width="168" height="258" />Death in Seville</em> </a>is back in circulation today, sixteen years after I started work on it as my very first book, initially called <em>Semana Santa. </em>Many thanks to my colleagues at Pan Macmillan for bringing another title back from by backlist after last year's <em>The Cemetery of Secrets.</em>

Authors are always fond of their first book. I feel very proud of this one. I still remember writing it in secret all those years ago, not telling a soul for fear I'd never finish it, or if I did it would be no good. The tale of its publication is worth retelling too for all of you out there wondering whether it's worth persevering after a string of rejections.<!--more-->

I finished the book at the end of the summer of 1994. I then set about what it tells you to do in the <em>Writers &amp; Artists Yearbook. </em>A string of letters to agents followed, with a brief synopsis of the book (I was never good at those) and a bio.

Not a soul wanted to read it. After running out of options in the UK I then desperately tried to interest a New York agent. No one wanted to read it there either. But one NY agent wondered whether her friend in London might not be interested. That friend -- who turned out to be my first, not my present, agent -- called out of the blue. She was from an agency that had already turned down the opportunity to read the manuscript.

Did I mention this? Course not. She was the first person to read the manuscript. She took five pages. Then ten. Then fifty. Then the whole book. Two months later I had a three-book contract and not long after that a movie deal (which did eventually turn into a movie too).

The lesson being... never, ever give up. If you're the giving up type you're in the wrong business.

Anyway that was a slightly different book from the one that's launched today. When I wrote <em>Semana Santa </em>I had no expectation it would be published, so many of the locations, names and cultural references were invented. In my head the book took place in Seville but I couldn't afford the time or money to go there and make it real. So it happened in an invented, unnamed place... which every reader assumed to be Seville.

This time round I was determined to be more careful. So <em>Death in Seville</em> is the same fundamental story as <em>Semana Santa</em> but with some substantial rewriting. It's now set in real-life Seville -- the bull ring, the Juderia, the little back streets. I've cleaned up some rough points that got through the initial editing. It's a little leaner and, I hope, a lot better.

It's lovely to see this old friend back on the bookshelves again. If you fancy looking at more of my backlist and use Kindle you can also read my second book, <em>Epiphany, </em>again too, and at a bargain price. <a href="http://davidhewson.com/books/epiphany/" target="_self">More on that here...</a>