The Neville Has All The Best Tunes # 2: THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST

Truth be told, we don’t know a hell of a lot about Stuart Neville (right), other than he’s a handsome cove and his forthcoming novel, THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST, has been described as “The best first novel I’ve read in years ... It’s a flat out terror trip” by no less a luminary than James Ellroy. Hmmmm, nice. Quoth the blurb elves:

Sooner or later, everybody pays - and the dead will set the price ...
  Former paramilitary killer Gerry Fegan is haunted by his victims, twelve souls who shadow his every waking day and scream through every drunken night. Just as he reaches the edge of sanity they reveal their desire: vengeance on those who engineered their deaths. From the greedy politicians to the corrupt security forces, the street thugs to the complacent bystanders who let it happen, all must pay the price.
  When Fegan’s vendetta threatens to derail Northern Ireland’s peace process and destabilise its fledgling government, old comrades and enemies alike want him gone. David Campbell, a double agent lost between the forces of law and terror, takes the job. But he has his own reasons for eliminating Fegan; the secrets of a dirty war should stay buried, even if its ghosts do not.  Set against the backdrop of a post-conflict Northern Ireland struggling with its past, THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST takes the reader from the back streets of the city, where violence and politics go hand-in-hand, to the country’s darkest heart. Often brutal, sometimes tender, the journey will see one man find his humanity while the other loses his.

Colour us intrigued. Meanwhile, there’s quite the Semtex blast of post-Troubles Norn Iron crime fiction coming to light these days. David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, Sam Millar’s BLOODSTORM, Garbhan Downey’s YOURS CONFIDENTIALLY, Adrian McKinty’s THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD, John McAllister’s LINE OF FLIGHT and – whisper it – CSNI’s own Gerard Brennan’s PIRHANAS. Will any of them rise to take the crown of El Maestro himself, Colin ‘Master’ Bateman? Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: JACK KAIRO

A surreal, affectionate homage to the private eye detective popularised by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Jack Kairo is a one-man show which rewards fans of the hardboiled school of crime writing in particular. The hard-drinking and wise-cracking Kairo (Simon Toal, right) steps out of a case – literally, a suitcase – and into a case that involves the murder of a General Rumsfeld, the solving of which leads him, via the obligatory femme fatale, a butler-cum-Satan called Cheney and a deranged scientist called Hans Blix, to uncover the real reason for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Directed by Nicole Rourke, the production strikes the correct note of heartfelt but shambolic endeavour, with cues being deliberately missed and the soundtrack at times drowning out Kairo’s witless musings. Toal, performing his own material, is the antithesis of the cool and cynical PI, constantly undermining his attempts to uncover the truth with his bumbling persona, a succession of well-timed prat-falls and exaggeratedly convoluted versions of the pithy one-liners associated with the genre. The backdrop to the ‘case’ feels a little dated at this point, and the satire of the Bush administration is clumsy, but Toal’s chameleon-like performance is hugely entertaining, with a note-perfect impersonation of film noir stalwart Peter Lorre the highlight. – Declan Burke

This review first appeared in the Sunday Times

“Sail Like Buggery, It’s The Filth!”

A Minister for Propaganda Elf writes: “The Grand Vizier (above, none too impressed with the getaway rig) would have it known that he is going on the lam, probably down Mexico way,* for the foreseeable future. Damn Feebs, eh? Like, whose business is it really what a man does in the privacy of his own home with a pair of dray horses, a tray of horse and a troupe of belly-dancing dwarves? Anyhoo, the blog known as Crime Always Pays may or may not be updated while the Grand Viz has it on his toes along the palm-fringed beaches on Jamaica’s south coast,* the updates largely dependent on whether or not GV gains access to some wi-fi in the far-flungest regions of the Gobi Desert.* If not, too bad. Either way, we shall all meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, although it’ll very probably be back here in about 10 days time. Until then, we’ll always have Paros.* Peace, out.”

* Cunning, eh? Track that, Feebs!

A GONZO NOIR: An Internet Novel # 10

The story so far: Failed author Declan Burke (right), embittered but still passably handsome, wakes up one morning to find a stranger in his back garden. The stranger introduces himself as Karlsson, a hospital porter who assists old people who want to die and the hero of a first draft of a novel Burke wrote some five years previously. Now calling himself Billy, he suggests a redraft of the story that includes blowing up the hospital where he works. Intrigued, Burke agrees to a collaboration, but things do not go swimmingly …
  For the reasons we’re publishing a novel to the interweb, go here.
  If you want to skip all that malarkey, the novel starts here.
  If you’re one of the 34,012 readers who have been following the story, the latest update can be found here.
  Now read on …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: A FIFTH OF BRUEN by Ken Bruen

In his introduction to this collection of early fiction by crime writer Ken Bruen, Allan Guthrie speaks of the “startling speed and unexpectedness of the violence”. He warns readers that they will “..say aloud, ‘What?’ Then re-read the paragraph and say, ‘Jesus, he really did just do that.” I must say I took this with a pinch of salt until I found myself doing exactly that on reading one of the short novels included in this collection.
  As the book progresses the levels and suddenness of the violence increase, but it is a violence that is characterised by the almost laconic way in which it is both executed and described. One can almost trace the evolution of Bruen’s later hero, Jack Taylor, in the parade of damaged male characters introduced in these pages. But the men do not have a lien on mayhem, for at least one woman, admittedly variously described as “away with the fairies” and “touched in the head”, has her own neat line in summary justice. But we are also treated to a number of the author’s observations on his fellow-countrymen, two of which had a particular resonance for me: “You can put anything to the Irish except direct questions” and “Being Irish means never having to say you don’t know”.
  Bruen’s compelling prose and vividly authentic dialogue invite the reader into the minds and hearts of the characters, and in the short stories the male characters are almost all pathetic losers in some way, even the bully Charles in “Liver”. Men who people the short stories totally misunderstand the women in their lives, live in their own dream worlds and appear bewildered by others’ reactions; and the author has contrived to mock their inadequacies while at the same time eliciting sympathy for their plight. There are also two recurring themes throughout the novels and short stories, the importance of dogs as human comforters, and the male obsession with a receding hairline. I think there is not one description of a male character that does not at some stage refer to the presence or absence of his hair. In “Shades of Grace” Ford admits his hair is thinning rapidly and asks, “How do you fatten hair?” In the first short story Charles is described as “A tall man, his hair was grey and thinning”, Brady in “God Wore Shoes is “almost bald”, while in “Twist of Lemon” we hear that Jack had “brown thinning hair and daily distress at recession”.
  Dysfunction and despair permeate all of the stories until the final semi-autobiographical story, “The Time of Serena-May”. This exudes the anger, misunderstanding and unconditional love of Frank and Cathy as they come to terms with the arrival of their daughter, Serena May, who has Down’s Syndrome. The contrasting insensitivity of some professional staff with the gentle caring attitude of others is beautifully conveyed, and the story completes this collection on a note that is positive and full of hope.

This ‘Book of the Month’ review first appeared in The Irish Emigrant

Reasons To Hate Tana French # 114: She’s Gorgeous

Given that Tana French’s debut IN THE WOODS was nominated for practically every prize going bar Inter-Stellar Time-Travelling Novel of the Year 2015, and secured a debutant Edgar in the process, you’d presume that the weight of expectations for THE LIKENESS would have turned her into a haggard witch. But lo! The vid below, courtesy of Blip TV, has the hauntingly beautiful Tana blithely chatting about IN THE WOODS, THE LIKENESS and her current work-in-progress, which features Cassie Maddox’s boss as a by-all-means-necessary rogue cop. Radiant, talented and successful – don’t know about you, but right now we’re hating Ms French here at Crime Always Pays. Sigh. Roll it there, Collette …

A GONZO NOIR: An Internet Novel # 9

The story so far: Failed author Declan Burke (right), embittered but still passably handsome, wakes up one morning to find a stranger in his back garden. The stranger introduces himself as Karlsson, a hospital porter who assists old people who want to die and the hero of a first draft of a novel Burke wrote some five years previously. Now calling himself Billy, he suggests a redraft of the story that includes blowing up the hospital where he works. Intrigued, Burke agrees to a collaboration, but things do not go swimmingly …
  For the reasons we’re publishing a novel to the interweb, go here.
  If you want to skip all that malarkey, the novel starts here.
  If you’re one of the 34,011 readers who have been following the story, the latest update can be found here.
  Now read on …

  Update: on the basis that it’s far, far more popular than Crime Always Pays’ spin-off site A Gonzo Noir, here’s the link to the latest upload to Lilyput’s World. Sigh …

Crime And Publishment

A Minister for Propaganda Elf writes: “The Sunday Independent carried a feature on Irish crime fiction yesterday, in which Anne-Marie Scanlon investigated the reasons for ‘the emergence and rapid growth of home-grown Irish crime fiction’. Being bloody-minded about such things, the Grand Viz would have it known that the piece – which highlights the authenticity of Irish crime writing, and the black humour inherent therein – does not mention Gene Kerrigan, purveyor of the most grittily realistic Irish crime fiction, nor Ruth Dudley Edwards (right), recent winner of the Last Laugh Award at Bristol’s Crime Fest, two very fine authors who are also exceptional journos who happen to write for the Sunday Indo. A self-deprecating Sindo? Shurely shome mishtake. Anyhoo, on with the show …”

Plenty Of Loot In Crime And Publishing

As George Gordon Liddy once said, “obviously crime pays, or there’d be no crime,” and as an ex-Nixon aide, he’d know. In the past decade, Ireland has experienced a wave of unprecedented affluence and, with that, a major explosion in crime. Aside from the obvious side effect of an increase in criminality, Ireland has, in the past 10 years, experienced another – the emergence and rapid growth of home grown Irish crime fiction.
  Declan Hughes, whose first book, THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD, appeared in 2004, sees a definite correlation between prosperity and the emergence of Irish crime fiction, but thinks the genre goes beyond the mere detailing of a society in catharsis.
  “Crime novels provide a flexible format to deal with society as it is and the way we live now. Crime novelists can tackle how society works, as well as what occurs in the human heart,” he says.
  Hughes’ sentiments are echoed by Tana French whose first novel, IN THE WOODS, published last year won the highly prestigious Mystery Writers of America Edgar for best first novel.
  “Crime and crime fiction are two of the best barometers of any society,” French says. “A crime novel will give you a clear snapshot of the priorities and deepest fears of a society at that given moment.”
  French cites the glut of serial killer novels published on the opposite side of the Atlantic during the late-Eighties and Nineties as an example of how crime fiction mirrors the real world.
  “American society at that time was becoming more and more anonymous,” she explains, “people were frightened by the anonymity of modern life, of not knowing who the person beside you really is. During that same period in Ireland, the murder rate was pretty low, and when a murder did occur, it was generally pretty obvious who the culprit was.”
  Paradoxically most crime fiction is extremely moral, and while (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde) the good might not always end happily, the bad usually finish unhappily. It is these themes that drew international bestseller and Godfather of Irish crime fiction, John Connolly, to the genre in the first place.
  “I wanted to write about justice, morality and redemption, themes which run through crime fiction like writing through a stick of rock,” he says.
  All three writers agree that the phenomenon of the Celtic Tiger and the subsequent transformation of Irish society has contributed greatly to the corresponding output of crime fiction. “The Celtic Tiger smashed into this country at 100mph,” French says, “we still haven’t assimilated it; we’re still trying to reconcile the past and present.”   The sins of the past feature prominently in French’s first book and are a consistent theme in all three of Declan Hughes’ novels.
  “Ireland used to be a place where ‘whatever you say, say nothing’.” Hughes explains. People didn’t ask questions and “there were plenty of skeletons in the closet, but in the past 10 years, those skeletons have started walking.”
  Hughes’ third novel, THE DYING BREED, which came out in May of this year, explores these themes, as well as examining the clash between “New Ireland” and the past.
  In THE LIKENESS, the second novel by Tana French, the young inhabitants of the “Big House” are shunned by the local community because of things that happened almost a century earlier. In MISSING PRESUMED DEAD, by Arlene Hunt, the past returns in the shape of a woman who was abducted 26 years earlier (and presumed dead.) The theme of the past and present struggling to coexist is also at work in Andrew Nugent‘s SECOND BURIAL, which deals with the murder of a young Nigerian immigrant and the effect this has on his community.
  “Logically,” Nugent says, “you would think an increase in affluence would lead to a decrease in crime, whereas the reverse is true.”
  Money, while both funding the boom and the parallel rise in crime is also, Hughes thinks, the catalyst that enabled people to speak out and enquire about things covered up in the past.
  Although he gives the ongoing tribunals, the Magdalene laundries and the industrial school system as examples of the “murkier secrets” of pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, he makes the point that the emergence of secrets and confronting the past are universal themes and not wholly unique to Ireland, which no doubt contributes to the increasing sales of Irish crime fiction abroad.
  Hughes goes on to say that the poor economy and lack of money in society was only one aspect inhibiting Irish writers from tackling crime fiction.
  “The Troubles were a contributing factor in hindering the development of the genre,” he says, adding that, in a violent society where there is a lot of killing (as opposed to individual murders) crime fiction is not much of a diversion. John Connolly shares this opinion. “What was happening then (terrorism) was so appalling nobody wanted to write about it.”
  Connolly sees a bright future ahead for Irish crime fiction, saying that, while a lot of modern crime fiction adheres to conventional formats and constructs, this isn’t the case with Irish crime writing, where “interesting things are happening. The great hunt in British publishing is to find the Irish Ian Rankin,” he says, referring to the highly successful Scottish author who created the best-selling Inspector Rebus series.
  Rankin was at the forefront of the boom in Scottish crime writing (known as Tartan Noir) which began in the late-Eighties. Connolly thinks there is a definite similarity between Tartan Noir and what began in Ireland a decade ago.
  “Social changes were occurring in Scotland at that time and society was being transformed,” he says, adding that the Scots are “grittier.”
  Arlene Hunt thinks part of the appeal of Irish crime writing is its realism. “People can relate to the characters,” Hunt says. “It’s not just about escapism; they like to hear the spoken word and the different accents and not just read about glamorous characters gambling in casinos in the south of France.”
  There is almost always an underlying thread of humour in Irish crime novels. In Declan Hughes’ THE DYING BREED, “Tommy Owens greeted me with a shake of the head and a look of appalled fascination, as if to say he’d seen some gobshites in his time, but I could be their king”. And a character in Tana French’s THE LIKENESS says of his stepmother, “she’s a dreadful woman, you know ... Everything about her is pure faultless middle-class -- the accent, the clothes, the hair, the china patterns -- it’s as if she ordered herself from a catalogue”. Like the other authors, Arlene Hunt sees the consequences of the Celtic Tiger boom reflected in current crime writing. Neither does Hunt desire to turn back the clock. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing that we’re a more aware, fast-moving, youthful sort of nation,” she says. “I remember the Eighties, when people had to emigrate because there was no work and no money.”
  John Connolly agrees. “People forget how grim Dublin was in the Seventies and Eighties,” he says. “There’s a lot of false nostalgia. I’m happier to see people working than not working.” Given the increasing popularity of Irish crime fiction, there’s certainly more than enough work for the authors who are busy making crime pay. – Anne Marie Scanlon

This article was first published in the Sunday Independent

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

It’s Norwegian week on Crime Always Pays, people, and courtesy of the lovely people at Faber and Faber we have three copies of K.O. Dahl’s THE FOURTH MAN and THE MAN IN THE WINDOW to give away. First, the blurb elves on THE FOURTH MAN:

In the course of a routine police raid, Detective Inspector Frank Frolich of the Oslo Police saves Elizabeth Faremo from getting inadvertently caught in crossfire. By the time he learns that she is the sister of Jonny Faremo, wanted member of a larceny gang, it is already too late – he is obsessed. Suspected, suspended and blindly in love, Frolich must find out if he is being used before his life unravels beyond repair.

Lovely jubbly. To be in with a chance of winning a brace of K.O. Dahl novels, just answer the following question.

Is The Muppet Show’s Swedish Chef known in Norway as:
(a) The Swedish Chef;
(b) The Danish Chef;
(c) The Italian Chef;
(d) I preferred Sesame Street, actually, but I’d really like some free books.

Answers via the comment box, with a contact email address (using (at) rather than @ to confound the spam-munchkins), before noon on Thursday, June 26. Et bon chance, mes amis …

Always Judge A Book By Its Cover # 418: THE LEMUR by Benjamin Black

If you’ve got a jones for cover artwork, you could do a lot worse than drop on over to The Readerville Journal, where Karen Templer is currently drooling over the latest Benny Blanco opus, THE LEMUR. To wit:

“I believe the name Keith Hayes is new to Most Coveted Covers, but he joins the list with bravado. I speak, of course, of his cover for THE LEMUR, by Benjamin Black (aka John Banville). Yes it is another example of great use of a stock photo. And yes it does remind me, in a way, of NEVER DRANK THE KOOL-AID. But this is so beautifully bold and simple: just a square-jawed man in a white shirt against a black ground; a pure white puff of smoke; a little bit of light on his black hair …”

There’s more detail – much more than you might have thought possible, in fact – in the same vein right about here. Meanwhile, Mr & Mrs Kirkus have had a good squint at what lies between the covers of THE LEMUR, their verdict running thusly:

“If the book’s big secret doesn’t quite live up to its press notices, Black’s prose is so mesmerizing—crisp, precise, alive with telling details—that you’ll enjoy every step in the trail that leads there.”

Sarah Weinman likes it too …

The Song Remains The Sam

Yon big-ups are still trundling in for Sam Millar’s BLOODSTORM, people, and everyone seems to be singing from the same – albeit unusually blackly comic – hymn-sheet. To wit:

“BLOODSTORM is a dark, edgy thriller, introducing Karl Kane as the first genuine anti-hero private detective – a man not afraid to bend the rules to straighten the law, and loves nothing better than to get down and dirty for the underdogs of society. Millar has created a brilliant warts-and-all anti-hero for us all to cheer on.” – Hooker Magazine

“BLOODSTORM is a classy, on-the-edge-of-your-seat thriller. Relentlessly violent it may be, but nevertheless delivers - in bloody spades - what it tells you on the cover. A sure-shot hit from Belfast’s most controversial writer …” – Sunday Life

“Sam Millar’s latest book BLOODSTORM is a gripping, disturbing read shot through with elements of dark humour. You will find yourself still reading at three in the morning not wanting to put the book down except to go and check that the doors and windows are
really secure. What Millar is clearly very good at is telling a story and in doing so he creates set piece scenes which will stay in your head for years to come.” – Ulla’s Nib

All we want to know is, how the hell do get ourselves reviewed in Hooker Magazine? Meanwhile, the effortlessly cool Albedo One – Ireland’s Magazine of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror – has an in-depth interview with our Sam, according to our Sam, but we’re in no position to verify or deny that information, since it costs a whopping €2 – yes, that’s €2! – to download the pdf version and we’re more tight-fisted than a guy who had just balled his fist to punch a nun collecting for charity when he got struck by lightning, and shrivelled up, thus rendering his fist tightly fisted for all eternity, or until we reach the end of this (fac)simile, whichever comes sooner. The bottom line? Never punch nuns during adverse weather conditions, or even try to, and buy Sam Millar’s BLOODSTORM. Did we mention we’re giving this advice away for free?

One Of These Kids Is Doing His Own Thing …

There’s no good reason for republishing this pic from Bristol Crime Fest (l-r: Maxine, Rhian, Karen, El Cheesalero – with Ms Witch lurking with intent, no doubt, just out of picture) except to say that three of the four crime fiction bloggers are superb exponents of what they do, which is to let the world at large know about quality crime fiction writing for no reward but the joy of doing so, while the fourth is only in it for the money. If you’re in the market for insightful, illuminating conversations about contemporary crime writing, click on Petrona, It’s A Crime! and Euro Crime. Oh, and while you’re about it, click on Crime Scraps, whose host – the inimitable Norm – was behind the camera for this epoch-defining snap. He reckons he’s shy, but your secret is safe with us, Salman. Now, the Big Question: can we persuade Peter Rozovsky and Gerard Brennan to make it to Crime Fest 2009? Only time, that notorious tittle-tattler, will tell …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 2,019: Ed Lynskey

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects . . .

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
HELL HATH NO FURY by Charles Williams, a 1953 noir classic about a smouldering small town and the desperate characters living there and double-crossing each other.
What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Nick Carroway had it pretty cool with Gatsby and the New York social elite.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Pulp Westerns.
Most satisfying writing moment?
When the check in the mail finally arrives in my mailbox.
The best Irish crime novel is . . .?
I don’t know if it’s necessarily Irish, but I enjoyed reading Ken Bruen’s AMERICAN SKIN a lot.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Any title by Ken Bruen, if it hasn’t already been filmed.
Worst/best thing about being a writer?
Worst thing is writing the first sentence. Best thing is writing the last sentence.
The pitch for your next book is . . . ?
Can a Mafia loan shark survive working in Washington D.C.?
Who are you reading right now?
James Lee Burke’s post-Katrina New Orleans sage, THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Read. Writing is too hard for me.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Smooth. Fast. Vivid.

Ed Lynskey’s PELHAM FELL HERE will be published by the Mundania Press in July

A GONZO NOIR: An Internet Novel # 8

The story so far: Failed author Declan Burke (right), embittered but still passably handsome, wakes up one morning to find a stranger in his back garden. The stranger introduces himself as Karlsson, a hospital porter who assists old people who want to die and the hero of a first draft of a novel Burke wrote some five years previously. Now calling himself Billy, he suggests a redraft of the story that includes blowing up the hospital where he works. Intrigued, Burke agrees to a collaboration, but things do not go swimmingly …
  For the reasons we’re publishing a novel to the interweb, go here.
  If you want to skip all that malarkey, the novel starts here.
  If you’re one of the 34,008 readers who have been following the story, the latest update can be found here.
  Now read on …

Publish And Be Damned # 24: Will Hoyle / BELLA MORTE

As if there weren’t enough outlets on the interweb already publishing unpublished fiction, Crime Always Pays belly-flops right into the deep end. In the second of what will very probably be an extremely short series, Will Hoyle (right) treats us to Chapter One of his work-in-progress, BELLA MORTE. You know where to put your bouquets and brickbats, people …

BELLA MORTE

1: CLAUSTROPHOBIC THINK-TANK

Confined to this crummy apartment, this eyesore in Brooklyn for yet another day. Ramshackle, rundown, rat-infested and mold-ridden and a Middle Eastern super who doesn’t give a wee shite about the lot of it. I set up by the open window because there’s no fire escape. And even if there were a bloody fire escape, it wouldn’t be the smartest place for me to put arse to chair anyway because I’m wanted by the NYPD and probably the feds by now too. The summer heat bleeds through the apartment and makes this dive as smoldering hot as the pit of Hades. I feel like a prisoner to it, a fugitive, trapped in this waiting room, this all too claustrophobic think-tank. But here I stay until the morning comes and I jump on a plane and become one hundred percent Calabrian.
  Haven’t reached out and phoned my family in Calabria, so they don’t even know I’m coming. Not many people know about my connection to them, so Italy’s a much safer bet than trying to make it back to Ma and Da in Ulster. One thing’s for sure … I’ll get to Southern Italy, bury myself in some farm or some church on a wee hill and retire from the business and learn to speak better Calabrese and see the whole country one day but straight away I’m going to do my best to blend in and make up a batch of lemonade out of a truck load of bloody lemons.
  Plan A. Reggio Calabria. San Luca. Mia famigghia.
  I sit tight, hold up in Mirko’s pad, having dressed myself up in his cargo pants and his Levski FC football jersey. Both smell like mildew and stewed cabbage but they’ll have to do until I can pry myself up on my bad leg and change into the new ones that Mirko’s just brought me. Been in these duds all afternoon now. Couldn’t change back into the clothes I wore this morning because they’re still scattered with my blood and Tong blood and all those in between. Been having to hide out, couldn’t use the washer and dryer down the hall on this floor because they’re down the bloody hall, and seen by anyone excluding my St. Petersburg comrade is not something I need to be right now.
  Much to my utter fooking shock, Mirko wasn’t all too happy to see me when I barreled my way into his apartment all bloodied and shot to kingdom shite. Called me all sorts of pleasantries before he reluctantly assembled all his tools and patched me up proper. Did it all pretty sharpish too, or maybe it just seemed that way due to the entire bottle of Zarskaya Vodka I put down to curb the pain of his poking and prying, the gouging and gushing. Had to undress down to my knickers when I let the ol’ bugger dig in and extract the Uzi 9mm rounds and buckshots from my thigh. Then he sewed up the needle dart wound in my shoulder, the knife wound in my foot.
  And every one of his “I told you sos” and “you shouldn’t have done thats” flew in one ear and directly out the other.
  I’m paranoid, shaky, apprehensive of all things excluding the Beretta in my hand. And I’ve already made my legitimate complaints about this but Mirko wrote them off as nagging and decided to blast his unholy Barynya music to drown me out. It made every pooch within earshot of the apartment howl like they’d never see the sun again. The music, if you can even call it that, sucked the big one but apparently, it was all he had.
Now he sits over there with his eyes glued to the tele, a squirrelly smirk on his crooked lips, another one of his god awful Sobranie Black cigarettes blazing between his grimy fingers.
  After perching myself in this spot by the window hours ago, I stand, stretch my legs, and it’s an ill-advise piece of thinking because it sends shockwaves of pain throughout me body. Aye, Mirko patched me up right as rain, suspiciously free of charge until he went to pull the bullets out of my leg and tried to work his other hand up my bare inner thigh. Thought maybe it was an accident until he went to stitch my shoulder and his other hand inconspicuously slid far too close to my left booby. It earned him a swift thumping to his Brillo pad noggin alright. He retained that it was an accident until I shot that down and called it utter bollocks. Then he decided to go with he hasn’t seen me in forever, that he’s missed me, and that he’s a lonely man. I gave him a choice. Patch me up, get me a new passport and driver’s license free of charge or I pull the trigger and make his head into a canoe.
  What choice did the bloke have?
  As I limp over towards him, I glare down at him because I’m still a bit cheesed about it. To try and make amends for his misdeeds, Mirko went out and brought me some fresh clothes, a good pair of scissors, a box of hair dye, and some colored contact lenses. They all sit there next to him on the table just between his ashtray and bottle of vodka. If there was ever a stereotypical, single Russian immigrant living at a dive in Brooklyn, it’d be Mirko. Sunken eyes, salt and pepper hair cut in a buzz, poorly-grown sandpaper beard that spreads like a mangy leprosy across his face and down his neck. Big, flaring nostrils and two front teeth that look right at home with the rats that run rampant inside his walls.
Despite the vast knowledge of medicine he learned in his time lent to the Russian Ground Forces, Mirko’s a scurvy wee wank who pays the bills by making fake passports, fake IDs, and by providing immediate medical attention to the criminal element in the greater New York City area. He also works part-time at Teddy’s Bar over on Berry Street.
  His eyes are glued to the news because he’s apparently fascinated with it. The local stations are running non-stop footage of the crime scenes over the tele. Uniformed peelers and plain-clothed peelers swarming the area, securing the parameter, shooting the bollocks while pretending to give a shite about the untimely demise of the most powerful attorney/philanthropist/criminal mastermind in the city.
  I don’t think they’ve linked this morning’s bloodbath to all the crimes I’ve committed in Charlotte, Virginia Beach, and Maryland in the past few days. Don’t think they’ve matched them to the shootings last year in Providence, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and New Orleans. Been a lot of places, done a lot of killing. No, they haven’t connected all the dots just yet but they will. With all the blood samples I’ve left behind over the last few days, they’ll soon know the name Cocoa McGrady and that’s why I have to change it and become a new person and flee the bloody country sharpish. I can’t help but feel like my time here in the US of A has run its course, that my days here are numbered. - © Will Hoyle 2008

“And Now The End Is Near / And We Face The Final Curtain / But Lo! / Do We Really?” Yep, It’s Tana French And Her Ambiguous Endings

It must be, oh, almost an entire week since we’ve mentioned Tana French (right) on Crime Always Pays, for which craven dereliction of duty we deserve nothing less than to be stood against a wall and shot with bullets of our own shite. Happily, Cream and Written By A Woman (!) rescues us from a fate worse than death with an early review of Tana’s second offering, THE LIKENESS, the gist of which runneth thusly:

“The book actually manages to surpass IN THE WOODS (her stunningly accomplished début) which is no small feat. Set in Dublin again (with the fictitious Murder Squad), this time it is Cassie who takes the lead in a plot which requires a little suspension of disbelief but pays off in spades. I caught nods to both THE SECRET HISTORY and THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (and anyone who has read Shirley Jackson gets automatic kudos from me), but they are mere nods since the central plot has nothing much to do with either …
  “French’s writing is taut, clever and, in places, truly chilling. She deserved all the praise heaped on her previous effort, and this should garner her even more. It’s a big book, but not daunting, and you’ll fly through it getting lost in the world of Whitethorn House and its inhabitants.
  “One caveat though (and not on my part; I love that French refuses to tie up her resolutions in a big shiny bow at the end): those who were disappointed with the ending of IN THE WOODS may find more to grumble about here. To me, resolutions that are not neat are more realistic, and infinitely more interesting than the bog standard crime novel resolutions, but if you like your endings completely wrapped up, you may not be happy with this ending either. However, that should be a minor quibble since a book as accomplished as this one holds many other treasures, not least the fluidity of the prose and the constant tension that seeps through it. One to savour, and I know I’ll be re-reading it in the future.”

Ah, ye olde ambiguouse endinge – what say you, Karen Harrington, ma’am?

“I understand ambiguous endings in novels and films. I’m a fan of them. I write them. And I’ve taken some heat for the ambiguous ending in JANEOLOGY. So I can understand the reasons an author employs this technique in her art. However, there comes a point when a writer must balance the ending on a scale of satisfaction by asking the question: Are my reasons for creating that ending in balance with a satisfying ending?
  “Assigning this question to Tana French’s formidable novel IN THE WOODS is tough …
  “Despite the issue with the ending, this book is still cleverly penned and engaging. French’s descriptions are first-class. Her scene-setting abilities are refined well beyond the skills of your typical debut author and this is no doubt one of the reasons this tale earned her an Edgar award. In sum, I liked this book. And in some ways, owing to the spooky atmosphere, I think this might make a better movie than it reads on the page.
  “So, what do you think? Are unresolved endings a good thing? And if so, what books including an ambiguous ending have you loved? Hated?”

  It has to be The Book of Revelations for us. That whole apocalypse deal – y’know, the ‘Will it-Won’t it?’ dynamic … sterling stuff from St John, we think you’ll agree.

Downey On The Up(ey)

A Minister for Propaganda Elf writes: “Journalist, author and general bon viveur about town Garbhan Downey’s latest offering, YOURS CONFIDENTIALLY, continues to go from strength to strength. Or so the mysterious masked man who dropped off the non-web reviews quoted below late last Friday night announced, before using his rapier to carve a ‘GD’ into our collective left buttock. Serves us right for answering a knockity-knock-knock at the dungeon door in nowt but an apron and oven gloves, eh? You don’t make that mistake twice.
  Anyhoo, those reviews runneth gistly:

“This is one humdinger of a novel, superbly constructed and brought to a majestic conclusion by an author who has proved himself the master of the ingenious and the architect of the amazing ending.” – Lawrence Moore at the County Times

“At times the startlingly fast-moving plot is pretty dark but it’s wickedly funny … Garbhan Downey at his very best with cruel one-liners packed onto every page.” – The Derry Journal

  “So there you have it. The secret to a happy life is (a) buy and read YOURS CONFIDENTIALLY, and (b) never be without a can of rapier-slice buttock salve. Did we mention we’re giving away these ideas for free?”

Mi Casa, Su Casa: KT McCaffrey

The continuing stooooooory of how the Grand Vizier puts his feet up and lets other people talk some sense for a change. This week: KT McCaffrey (right) on soundtracks and writing.

“I’ve tended to incorporate music and song in all of my books to date. I love the idea of having a soundtrack in the background to add that extra degree of atmosphere and encapsulate a special moment in time. I do believe my crime fiction writing has been influenced by certain tunes, lyrics that I’d been exposed to before reaching my teens. I’ve had this almost irrational fascination with song lyrics for as long as I can remember. Back when I attended national school in Clara, Co. Offaly, there was a great colourful Wurlitzer jute box in town that stocked many American Imports and had that great booming bass sound you only get with jute boxes. This was at a time just before the Beatles came along, a time when pop music was in the doldrums.
  “Each day during lunch break I’d sneak into the Bon Bon shop and drop my coins into the slot, press the required numbers and watch the discs being picked up from a rack and flipped on to the turntable. One of the song from that period to take hold of my senses, and create film-like imagery in my head, was ‘El Paso’, by Marty Robbins. What I found so extraordinary about it was its ability to portray such vivid pictures in so few words.
  “These first few verses illustrate what I mean:

Out in the West Texas town of El Paso
I fell in love with a Mexican girl.
Night-time would find me in Rosa’s cantina;
Music would play and Felina would whirl.

Blacker than night were the eyes of Felina
Wicked and evil while casting a spell
My love was deep for this Mexican maiden;
I was in love but in vain, I could tell

One night a wild young cowboy came in
Wild as the west Texas wind
Dashing and daring,
A drink he was sharing
With wicked Felina,
The girl that I loved.
So in anger I
Challenged the right for the love of this maiden
Down went his hand for the gun that he wore
My challenge was answered in less than a heart-beat
The handsome young stranger lay dead on the floor ...

  “See what I mean? For me, as a ten-year old, the imagery in the lyrics had the kind of impact a Coen Brothers movie might have on me today. Another song that I played to death on that old Wurlitzer, and that made a similar impression on me, was Lefty Frizzell’s ‘Long Black Veil’. Here again, in just a few lines, and in less than three minutes, the whole gamut of love, the eternal triangle, and murder, is delivered in spades:

Ten years ago on a cold dark night
There was someone killed ‘neath the town hall light
There were a few at the scene, but they all agreed
That the slayer who ran looked a lot like me.
The judge said son what is your alibi
If you were somewhere else then you wont have to die
I spoke not a word though it meant my life
For I had been in the arms of my best friends wife.
The scaffold is high and eternity near
She stands in the crowd and sheds not a tear
But sometimes at night when the cold wind blows
In a long black veil she cries o’er my bones.
She walks these hills
In a long black veil
She visits my grave
When the night winds wail
Nobody knows, nobody sees
Nobody knows but me.

  “Artists like Johnny Cash and Mick Jagger have since recorded versions of Long Black Veil, so obviously I’m not alone in being moved by this simple but evocative song. And talking of Johnny Cash, he, more than most, had the ability to cut a story down to a mere handful of words, while still creating a powerful impact, eg: Folsom Prison Blues:

When I was just a baby
My Mama told me “Son,
Always be a good boy,
Don’t ever play with guns,”
But I shot a man in Reno,
Just to watch him die,
When I hear that whistle blowin’
I hang my head and cry.

  “Yes folks, these are but a few of the songs that set my toes tapping and the cine-camera inside my head whirring. My taste in music has moved along and I love some of today’s output, but my heart remains captivated by those early memories from the late ’50s and early ’60s. There’s a whole bunch of similar story songs of crime and passion that would take up too much space to reproduce on CAP blog but if any of you are interested, you could do a lot worse than google songs like Open Pit Mine by George Jones, Saginaw Michigan by Lefty Frizzell, or Dolly Parton’s The Carroll County Accident.
  “There might even be an idea there for a good crime fiction novel there …” - KT McCaffrey

KT McCaffrey’s THE CAT TRAP is published by Robert Hale

The Embiggened O # 2,049: ’Tis Better To Have Loved And Lost Than A Scoreless Draw

A Minister for Propaganda writes: “We have no idea who the delightful chap Chapbook quoted below is, but he cheered up the Grand Vizier immensely yesterday with his achingly poignant insights into our humble offering, THE BIG O, which did very little to puncture the Grand Viz’s planet-dwarfing ego*. To wit:

A hard-boiled crime (not detective) “caper” with taut dialogue, post-modern syntax, and a break-neck pace, elements to make Chandler and Hammett proud. Highly recommended for fans of the crime genre … Lots of characters in this one who all become very nicely entangled – nice for our sake, I should say, if not for theirs. This book was very good, but the last page left me a little confused. But nothing so major that it spoiled the rest of it for me. I walked away still pleased. Rating: 3/4 Specs (good/very good)

  “Thank you kindly, Mr Chapbook sir. By the way, we do like a man who walks away from a book when it’s over. Because a book is a lot like a relationship. And you can’t put a woman on a shelf when you’re done and still expect her to be as good as you remember when you take her down again and dust her off for another whirl. No, it’s best to just walk away. No regrets. Better to have loved and lost than a scoreless draw. Peace, out.”

 * Neptune

Is It Just Us? # 201: OUT STEALING HORSES by Per Petterson

It’s won top prizes and very probably outsold the Mac by now, but seriously folks – why all the fuss over OUT STEALING HORSES? Recommended to your humble hosts by a good friend whose opinion we very much value, the silence-exile-cunning schtick seemed like our kind of thing. And yes, there’s a gamin appeal to the contemporary Grizzly Adams-style retreat to the wilderness, but we made it halfway through the book with only an accidental death and the possibility of illicit affair to sustain the narrative. There’s plenty of walking the dog to be had, and any amount of reverie about how beautiful the Norwegian landscape is, and stout, yeomanly prose frustratingly reminiscent of a callow Cormac McCarthy. But reasons to keep reading in the hope of a unique experience that might justify all the hype? Nary a one. We’re not trying to be obtuse, believe it or not – we just don’t get it. Can anyone help?

A GONZO NOIR: An Internet Novel # 7

The story so far: Failed author Declan Burke (right), embittered but still passably handsome, wakes up one morning to find a stranger in his back garden. The stranger introduces himself as Karlsson, a hospital porter who assists old people who want to die and the hero of a first draft of a novel Burke wrote some five years previously. Now calling himself Billy, and desperate to escape the limbo of non-publication, he suggests a redraft of the story that includes blowing up the hospital where he works. Intrigued, Burke agrees to a collaboration, but things do not go swimmingly …
The novel starts here. If you’re one of the three readers who have been following the story, the latest update, section 7, can be found here. Now read on …

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

The generous folk at Serpent’s Tail have been kind enough to offer us three copies of Adrian McKinty's THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD to give away, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

Michael Forsythe might be, as one of his assailants puts it, ‘un-fucking-killable’, but that doesn’t seem to deter people from trying. He’s living in Lima, reasonably well-hidden by the FBI’s Witness Protection Program, but Bridget Callaghan, whose fiancé he murdered twelve years ago, has an enduring wish to see him dead. So when her two goon assassins pass him the phone to speak to her before they kill him, Michael thinks she just wants to relish the moment. In fact, out of desperation, she is giving him a chance to redeem himself. All he has to do is return to Ireland and find her missing daughter. Before midnight. Tenacious and brutal, with the hunted man’s instinct for trouble, Forsythe leaves a trail of mayhem as he tries to end the bloody feud once and for all. THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD pulsates with break-neck action and wry literary references; McKinty’s distinctly Irish voice packs a ferocious punch.

Those dulcet tones? Shurely shome mishtake. Anyhoo, to be in with a chance of winning a copy, just answer the following question.

Is the structure of THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD loosely modelled on:
(a) ULYSSES;
(b) ANNA KARENINA;
(c) THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS;
(d) Sorry, I came over all unnecessary from the heady waft of testosterone. What was the question again?

Answers via the comment box, leaving an email contact address (please use (at) rather than @ to confuse the spam-munchkins), before noon on Thursday, June 19. Et bon chance, mes amis …

ReJoyce: ’Tis Bloomsday In All Its Feckin’ Nuttiness

It being June 16, aka Bloomsday, the anniversary of some ULYSSES-related malarkey involving the scoffing of much fried kidneys whilst wearing wardrobe cast-offs from Oliver Twist, we’d like to mark the occasion with yet another Crime Always Pays outing for our favourite short film of all time, Pitch ‘n’ Putt with Joyce ‘n’ Beckett, which was written and directed by genius-in-waiting Donald Clarke. Roll it there, Collette …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: WHAT WAS LOST by Catherine O’Flynn

Catherine O’Flynn’s debut novel was first published way back in January 2007, but it recently won the Costa First Novel Award, a coup for its independent Birmingham-based publishers, Tindal Street Press. However, a year and a half later, the subject matter is still relevant and captures the zeitgeist, as it explores the impact that a missing child has on a community and various individuals 20 years after the event.
  O’Flynn divides her narrative into four separate parts, which skip from the voice of Kate Meaney, the 10-year-old amateur detective who vanishes without a trace from Green Oaks shopping centre in 1984, to those of Lisa, a disenchanted deputy manager at a chain music store, and Kurt a security guard who keeps seeing a little girl on the CCTV footage in the dead of night. Both live in 2004, and Kate’s disappearance has affected each in different ways.
  Disparate other voices are also interspersed into the main body of the story; all are anonymous, reflecting the centre’s unification but ultimate isolation of very different people.
  O’Flynn splices a variety of genres in WHAT WAS LOST: she successfully mixes crime tropes with those of literary and women’s fiction and the result is a touching, often funny, tale of love and loss within the sterile confines of a homogenous shopping centre and its fractured, post-consumerist community. – Claire Coughlan

A GONZO NOIR: An Internet Novel

Failed writer Declan Burke (right), embittered but still passably handsome, writes: Many thanks to everyone who took the time to leave a comment when I asked if it made sense that the interweb novel A GONZO NOIR were to get its own blog, so that its instalments will read in an linear fashion rather than in the clumsy way I was posting them to Crime Always Pays. The answer, surprisingly enough, was a resounding ‘Yay’, and so the new blog opened for business yesterday with post on the Crime Space forum announcing the news.
  It was a somewhat less-than-auspicious beginning, as the ever-radiant Angie got in touch some hours later to say that I was in breach of the Crime Space protocols on self-promotion, and that the forum article would have to be removed. ‘Lummee,’ says we, ‘we can’t even give our stuff away for free these days.’
  Bloodied but unbowed, we herewith announce the arrival of the A GONZO NOIR blog, to which the entire novel will be posted in the coming months. The plan is to upload a new instalment at least once a week; when we do, we’ll provide a heads up on CAP and a link direct to the new section. The story starts here; for all three of you who have been following the tale already, the latest update comes here.
  Finally, yesterday’s post on Crime Space, which explains the reasons behind posting a novel to the interweb, to wit:

The first question people tend to ask about A GONZO NOIR is, ‘Why waste a perfectly good novel publishing it to the internet?’
  This presupposes that it is good, let alone perfectly good.
  Actually, it doesn’t. What people really mean is, ‘Why publish a novel-length story for free when someone might pay you to publish it as a conventional novel?’
  Well, there’s a lot of reasons.
  The first is that I’ve always wanted to publish a novel to the web, because it’s there and because I can.
  The second reason is that I’m pretty sure the story isn’t a commercially viable one. I believe it’s up to the standard of my previously published novels, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE and THE BIG O, but the story itself – which concerns itself with a hospital porter who decides to blow up the hospital where he works – isn’t the kind of thing to get publishers’ hearts racing.
  The third reason, and this is a rather more vague one, is that I feel that its protagonist, Billy / Karlsson, belongs on the web as opposed to between covers. This is just an instinct, of course, and not something I can really explain.
  The fourth reason is that giving away something for free runs contrary to the prevailing spirit of our times, and I’ve always been a bit out of kilter what tends to be popular and profitable.
  Fifthly, and lastly, and pragmatically, my novel THE BIG O is being published by Harcourt in September, and publishing a free novel to the internet might well be an unusual way of generating some attention for it.
  If you do take the time to read some or all of A GONZO NOIR, let me take this opportunity to thank you in advance. And if you feel moved to make a comment on any aspect of the story, I will be most grateful.
  Yours,
  Declan Burke

Uptown Top Rankin

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, certainly, what with all that Bristol malarkey, but there’s still no excuse for us allowing this little nugget to slip under the radar. Colin ‘Master’ Bateman (right) takes up the story:

“Hi there – Thought maybe you should mention for anyone in Dublin and surrounds that I’ll be interviewing Sir Ian Rankin on the stage of the Gate Theatre – as opposed to the dressing room, or the bar, obviously – on Sunday night as part of the Dublin Writers Festival. I have no idea what we’ll be talking about but we may touch on the subject of Rebus, and the fact that I actually created the character for television which he has since ripped off in a series of moderately successful books.”

If Sir Ian’s interview with Peter Guttridge at Bristol is anything to go by, it should be a very entertaining night indeed – although, if Ian starts a joke with “Two paving stones walk into a bar,” plug your ears immediately or you’ll have bad-pun nightmares for weeks after. All the booking details can be found here, although the Grand Viz won’t be able to get along, sadly, as he has longstanding plans to be worshipping at the feet of the other genius gracing a Dublin stage on Sunday night. If you do get along to The Gate, feel free to drop us a line and let us know how it went …

“Doh! A Deer!” Yep, ’Tis The Funky Friday Round-Up

“There was a time long, long ago in a galaxy not too far from here when we called the Friday Round-Up ‘Funky Friday’s Freaky-Deak’, the ‘freaky-deak’ bit being our little homage to El Maestro, Elmore Leonard. Unfortunately, we’ve subsequently discovered – naïve souls that we are – that ‘freaky-deak’ has a particular connotation in the world of interweb pornography (not pictured, right), and that a number of one-handed surfers were landing at Crime Always Pays to find themselves very disappointed indeed. Apologies, chaps – from here on in, the deak goes unfreaked at CAP Towers.
  “Anyhoo, onwards with the round-up. First off comes the belated news that Liam Durcan won the CWA’s Arthur Ellis ‘Best First Novel’ prize for GARCIA’S HEART, and a hat-tip to Durcan’s fellow Canadian-Irish scribe John McFetridge for giving us the nod as early as a week ago, at which point we were scraping the bottom of a barrel of Patented Elf-Wonking Juice™ over in Bristol. Still, it’s the thought that counts, right?
  “Over now to the lovely people at Fish Publishing in Cork, who have announced that this year’s Fish Knife Award for crime fiction short stories is now taking submissions. “5,000 words on any kind of crime, from piracy to petty larceny, from murder to misdemeanour,” say they, with the winner receiving €1,000, and engraved silver fish-knife, and publication in the 2000 Fish Anthology. The closing date is August 31, and all the details can be found here …
  “An old friend of CAP, Sam Millar’s BLOODSTORM was published last month to something of a baloohaha, and it looks like the novel is going to have legs. The good folk over at U.TV are currently perusing it for an online book group review, and so far the buzz has been very positive indeed. Is it Millar time? It’s always Millar time, people …
  “Finally, another old friend of CAP, Mr American Hell himself, has been busy a-doodling and has come up with another crime fiction cartoon classic. We likey. Oh, and while we’re on the subject of cartoons and animation – if anyone knows of anyone working in animation who might be interested getting on board with making a 30-second short movie designed to promote our humble offering THE BIG O on the occasion of its US release, please let them know that we have plenty of ideas but damn-all cash. Yep, that should get ’em battering our door down …
  “And that’s about it for another week, folks. Enjoy the weekend and don’t forget to come back, y’all. Peace, out.”

Leave Elegance To The Taylor

If you’re out to describe the truth, Albert Einstein once said, leave elegance to the tailor. A shame, then, he didn’t live long enough to meet the urbane, suave and generally god-like Andrew Taylor (right). Herewith be Andrew’s doodlings on Bristol’s CrimeFest, the essential ingredient of hard-boiled crime, and the true crime story behind his latest novel, BLEEDING HEART SQUARE …

“I’m just back from CrimeFest in Bristol, the first of what looks like becoming an annual event in the crime writing calendar. Two years ago, the organisers, Adrian Muller and Myles Allfrey, brought the long-running American convention to Left Coast Crime to Bristol. But this was their very own event, and - in the opinion of most people I talked to - all the better for it. The weather was uncharacteristically fine as well, which helped. And Bristol itself is a city always worth returning to.
  “An immutable natural law governs these conferences, which is that the bar exerts a dark gravitational pull that most crime writers are powerless to resist. I had hardly arrived on Friday morning before I found myself sitting at a corner table with Ruth Dudley Edwards.
  “A certain amount of inevitable camera wobble is visible in the photograph (right), which shows from left to right in a mutually supportive cluster (eight legs are so much more stable than two) Laurie King, Richard Reynolds of Heffers Bookshop in Cambridge, Ruth and myself. Later on, Ruth won the Last Laugh Award (and the loudest cheer) at the Gala Dinner.
  “By a curious coincidence on more than one occasion I found myself in the bar with Declan Hughes. We continued our conversation at the gala dinner, which is when Declan was discussing the idea that hard-boiled crime fiction tends to blossom in cities at a particular point in their development.
  “Anne Enright made a similar point in her Guardian review of Declan’s latest, The Dying Breed (John Murray): “Declan Hughes’ Dublin recalls Hammett’s San Francisco and Chandler’s 1940s LA – hot-money towns in which the social wax was not yet set. What hard-boiled does best is portraying the moment a society turns respectable, or tries to ...”
  “It was one of those light-bulb moments. Dublin, Declan was saying, has reached its hard-boiled era. Context is all. It’s widely recognised that there is a relationship between particular types of crime fiction and the societies in which they flourish. But it’s an idea rarely explored in much depth, and I wish someone would do it for me ... but maybe they have?
  “I was at CrimeFest primarily to promote my next book, BLEEDING HEART SQUARE. As that is set in the 1930s, I’m not entirely sure what context has to do with it - unless of course I’m rather behind the times, a possibility my children often suggest is better than plausible.
  “The book derives from a story my grandmother told me about what she used to call “our” murder. In 1899, a bear-like philanderer named Samuel Dougal seduced a sweet-faced, middle-aged spinster named Camille Holland. She was some years older than himself. He was attracted to her fortune. He persuaded her to buy the Moat Farm near Saffron Walden in Essex with some of her money.
  “The farm belonged to my granny’s family: as a child in the 1890s, she and her sister often stayed there and played in their white pinafore dresses beside the moat. Only 30 miles from London as the crow flies, it’s an isolated and curiously bleak spot, even today. The nearest house, the Vicarage, was nearly half a mile away over muddy fields.
  Miss Holland was a fragile, finicky town-bred lady, accustomed to pavements. Mud scared her. So did cows. She was a prisoner.
  “Three weeks after they moved into the farm, Dougal shot Miss Holland by the bridge over the moat. He buried her in a disused ditch. Over the next four years he methodically embezzled her fortune while living the life of an aspiring country gentleman.
  “Dougal was a compulsive womaniser. At one time he was having affairs simultaneously with two sisters and their mother. Most of his victims were country women. He owned one of the first bicycles in the area, and it is said that he taught his prospective victims to ride in the meadow north of the farm. He persuaded them that it was essential for them to remove their clothes before lessons.
  As a result, he fathered a rash of unfortunate little bastards. This is what upset people in the end, and started them asking awkward questions. The police traced the embezzling first. Then they moved into Moat Farm and began to look for Miss Holland.
  “The investigation was national news. People sold postcards of the farm. There’s one of the police searching the moat. When they found what was left of the body, the place became a tourist attraction, attracting ghoulish crowds in a holiday mood.
  In the end she was identified largely by her clothes. Dougal sold his story to The Sun (he claimed it was all a dreadful mistake, for which he blamed his unfortunate predilection for brandy).
  “Dougal was hanged at Chelmsford. If he had had the sense to bury Miss Holland in the farm’s midden, it is unlikely that after four years there would have been enough left to identify her.
  “Other elements fed into BLEEDING HEART SQUARE - not least the real and strangely atmospheric Bleeding Heart Yard and its surroundings north of Holborn in London. And then there’s the British Union of Fascists, who marched their way into the book via a curious museum in the Forest of Dean. But all that’s another story.” – Andrew Taylor

A GONZO NOIR: A Short Interlude, And Two Questions

“As one or two of you may or may not have noticed, failed writer Declan Burke (right), embittered but still passable handsome, recently began publishing a novel, A GONZO NOIR, to this blog. Basically, the idea was that a character from a draft I’d written five years ago stepped out of the pages of the m/s and demanded a rewrite, as he – Karlsson – was trapped in limbo. It was an intriguing prospect, so I agreed. Unfortunately, the character – now calling himself Billy – decided that he needed at least a little autonomy when it came to deciding his fate.
  “That’s understandable on one level, as Karlsson / Billy, who works as a hospital porter, is something of a sociopath who is being investigated by the cops because aging patients have begun to die in what appear to be ‘Angel of Mercy’ assisted deaths; furthermore, Billy is now plotting to blow up the hospital.
  “Were I in his shoes, I too would want to believe that my fate wasn’t entirely in the hands of someone like me.
  “On the other hand, collaboration doesn’t come easy to me in any walk of life, and writing especially appeals to me as a private, solitary business.
  “What matters there is that Billy, as a character trapped in limbo, has nothing to lose. I, on the other hand, have a family and a young daughter, Lily, whom Aileen found in the garden shed after I’d had a dispute with Billy, this despite the fact that Lily is as yet unable to crawl.
  “So you can appreciate that there are issues that will have to be dealt with. I’ve already tried burning the manuscript, only to discover that, as Billy put it, the genie is already out of the bottle. For now there is an uneasy détente between us, as I wait to see what it is he will contribute to the story. Given that Billy will be reading this, you can appreciate that I shouldn’t really say any more than that for now.
  “There are, however, other issues, chief among them the technical aspect of revealing a story section-by-section. Serial instalments, of course, have a proud history, going all the way back to Homer and THE ILLIAD. Unfortunately, a blog doesn’t lend itself to the kind of seamless narrative that makes a story easy to read, as any reader who might come to the story as we go forward will need to go back in time in order to catch up. This is at best inelegant and at worst pointless, as most interweb surfers will simply not bother to click the relevant link.
  “So here’s what I’m proposing to do. Instead of uploading the novel section by section to Crime Always Pays, I’m thinking of uploading the story to a separate blog so that it reads the way a narrative should. As we are still redrafting as we go along, this means the story will be incomplete and a little rough around the edges, to put it mildly – in fact, it’s the writing equivalent of washing your dirty laundry in public.
  “From a reader’s point of view, however, a separate blog means the story can be read in a linear fashion and be more easily digestible than the way it is being uploaded here. And, as I’m a reader before I’m a writer, and always will, the idea appeals.
  “So, dear readers – all three of you – what say you? Yay or nay to A GONZO NOIR on a separate blog in a linear fashion that allows you to simply scroll down to the latest instalment?”