Although I’ve been writing novels and newspaper articles for years, I also come from a design background of sorts. In the late 1990s, stuck for something to do, I took an art and design course; I’ve worked on page layouts and design for magazines and papers; I’ve always liked to sketch and am actually quite good at it! (Totally colour-blind, though – painting is a no-no.)

I also love books with a mad passion, and their design is of some interest to me. I’ve always felt that more novels should have a design element to them; after all, why limit yourself to just text? I wrote about this for the Guardian last year (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/13/illustrations-fiction-novels?INTCMP=SRCH)– this explains my thinking in more detail.

Anyway, if you get a copy of Even Flow, you’ll see there are designed inserts between chapters – mock-ups of newspaper clippings, email correspondence and so on –and each chapter title page has an image: something oblique but evocative, tangentially related to the action or theme of that section. I did these up myself in a design programme (don’t worry, I’m not blowing my own trumpet; the computer makes it all very easy).

Similarly, I’ve always had an interest in the design of book covers. Or to be more precise, how bad so many of them are.

There have been many beautiful, arresting and iconic covers, of course, but too often the cover feels like an afterthought: just something to fill the blank space of the cardboard binding the book, more-or-less. This is a real pity. So much work has gone into the narrative itself, all that writing and editing and proofing and thinking and consulting and creating. But then the cover, the first point of contact for readers, is so mediocre, so uninspired, so lazy.

And crime fiction is as bad as any genre for this. Think of all the crime novels you’ve read – how many actually had a good cover? Usually they just mix and match from a small selection of staple ingredients: dark colours, ragged fonts, vague splatters of red (meant to suggest blood, I guess), silhouettes of people or guns or buildings, and that’s about it.

This is presumably supposed to be scary or menacing or whatever. It comes across as pedestrian and half-assed.

Half the time they don’t even make sense for that particular book. A while back I read a very enjoyable thriller by a very famous American writer whose name I won’t give here; in fairness, it’s unlikely he had anything to do with the cover anyway. The cover was – yes – dark, murky, et cetera.

And the picture was of a road leading into a forest at night. The problem was, this book was set in a city and featured no scenes of forests, at all. Not one. I don’t know about you, but that would annoy me: the fact that the publishers just threw up any old image and basically said, “Here, this is good enough.”

It shouldn’t be good enough. The book, the author and the audience deserve better. So when we came to doing up the cover for Even Flow, I suggested a concept that had been whirling around in my mind for years.

A man in a tuxedo and balaclava, staring at the camera, holding a pistol down by his side. Behind him is a red theatre curtain; the spotlight is on him.

What this cover says is, “Settle into your seats – the curtain is about to rise, our show’s about to begin.” And this is meant on two levels. First, the story is about to commence for the reader; the “show” that is our engagement with a book.

Second, the vigilante gang in Even Flow aren’t just kicking ass and taking names: they’re making statements. Political, social, sexual…and artistic. This is vigilantism, protest and direct action as a sort of performance art.

So when they begin their campaign – their “war” on macho society – it’s as if they’re lifting the curtain on a performance. Pay attention, world, this is where the fun begins.

(Clearly I am not in favour of vigilantism, violence or anything else! I’m a total scaredy-cat pacifist. But this is how theythink, so I wanted to represent that on the cover.)

The Even Flow design makes sense, then, thematically; and it’s also, I hope, an eye-catching, dramatic and cool image from a purely visual angle. It should stand out on a crowded bookshop shelf or as an online thumbnail. It should make a browser pause, and consider it for a moment, and ask themselves, Hmm – what’s this all about?

Should– hopefully will – possibly won’t. I’m a realist as well as a quixotic artistic dreamer! But at very worst, at least the publishers and me can be happy that we’ve made an effort with our cover, we’ve put some thought and work into it; we’ve given that cover the care and attention which it, and you the reader, deserve.

And at least it’s not just a silhouette, of a man holding a gun, in front of a forest, at night…

Even Flow by Darragh McManus, published September 28 by Roundfire, available in print or e-book, in shops and online

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