THE LOVERS: A Many-Splendoured Thing, Apparently

Further to the genre / literary gulf farrago of earlier in the week, here’s the intros to two recent Sunday Times reviews of crime novels. The first is by John P. O’Sullivan, reviewing John Connolly’s THE LOVERS (no link):

Crime thrillers are a guilty pleasure – like a visit to McDonald’s when nobody is looking. These days, we can make gluttons of ourselves as many Irish writers, freed from depicting sexual guilt and rural angst, are taking advantage of the growing market for this genre. Even worthies such as the novelist John Banville (using the pseudonym Benjamin Black) and the playwright Declan Hughes have taken occasional leave of their literary toils to jump on the paddy-wagon.
  The most successful of this new breed of Irish writer is John Connolly …

The second is by John Dugdale, reviewing Thomas Pynchon’s INHERENT VICE:

Set in 1970, Thomas Pynchon’s first venture into crime fiction is a serio-comic homage that wryly mimics the tropes of Raymond Chandler’s novels. Like Philip Marlowe, its hero Doc Sportello is a Californian private eye, pursuing a quest that sees him getting beaten up, becoming a murder suspect himself, clashing regularly with an LAPD cop, escaping captors bent on killing him, and seduced by alluring women he interviews.
  Doc, however, prefers marijuana to bourbon and calls his one-man outfit LSD (location, surveillance, detection) Investigations …

  What I find interesting is that Dugdale doesn’t feel any pressure to excuse, explain or otherwise contextualise Pynchon’s decision to write a crime novel; while O’Sullivan, writing exclusively for the Irish edition of the Sunday Times’ Culture magazine, goes out of his way to make excuses to his Irish audience (“a guilty pleasure”) on behalf of one of the finest crime writers currently plying his trade, who just so happens to be Irish.
  Is it an Irish thing? An inferiority complex buried in the genetic code? A pathological fear of being considered not quite serious? Of being laughed at?
  “Arrah now, shir, yir honir, isn’t grand we do be to be doin’ the spellins at all, atall?”
  O’Sullivan’s verdict on THE LOVERS, incidentally, is that, “Connolly has served up good, solid fare with the occasional piquant surprise. You may not be getting haute cuisine when you read him, but you’re getting gourmet burger rather than McDonald’s.”
  Were he to damn the book with praise fainter, he’d have had to use invisible ink. Meanwhile, here’s some other recent reviews:

You may at times think you are reading a literary novel but then Connolly will remind you he’s just as adept at the violent strategies of the thriller. Either way you will be left shaken by the experience. – Barry Forshaw, Sunday Express

John Connolly, author of THE REAPERS and THE UNQUIET, more successfully mixes the supernatural into the crime novel in THE LOVERS … Connolly is building a solid following here in the States, and his stylish thrillers deserve even wider attention. – Michael Berry, San Francisco Chronicle

The supernatural element in Connolly’s Parker books has always annoyed some fans, who feel it nudges what are essentially crime novels too far into Stephen King territory. It’s present here as an unobtrusive background hum – the perfect complement to Parker’s measured narration. – John O’Connell, The Guardian

“It’s not all crooks and spooks; Connolly is far too skilled a writer to create mere schlock-horror. He’s at his best getting inside his characters’ heads … Connolly’s latest novel is unashamedly gothic, but ultimately manages to be believable and moving too.” Rebecca Armstrong, The Independent

  Finally, and while it’s a bit wearying to get bogged down in this kind of pedantic bullshit … Apropos John Sullivan’s intro to THE LOVERS review, John Banville has published three Benjamin Black novels since his last Banville novel, while Declan Hughes has published four crime novels since last he penned a play. Also – and I do appreciate that this is hardly worth mentioning – both Banville and Hughes were actually quite interested in the crime narrative back in their more worthy days, regardless of whether they were writing literary novels or plays such as NIGHTSPAWN, TWENTY GRAND, THE UNTOUCHABLE, THE WOMAN IN WHITE and THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE.
  The defence rests, m’lud …

Now That’s What I Call A Review: Ian Sansom on Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE

Ian Sansom reviewed THE TWELVE for the Irish Times last weekend, and gave it a right good big-up, with the gist running thusly:

With its chorus of ghosts, its gore, and its endless complications, THE TWELVE is basically a revenge tragedy in the Elizabethan mode, scripted by Quentin Tarantino and produced by the makers of The Bourne Identity. The hero in a revenge tragedy, of course, is also a monster, and Neville’s hero is possessed of virtues that are almost entirely negative, his motives and decisions thoroughly dubious …
  The novel is by no means perfect – there is perhaps a funeral too many, and too much hopping in and out of cars, too many mobile phone tip-offs, a sequel-indicating ending. But it possesses a profound and wider significance. There has, in recent years, been an upsurge of powerful crime and thriller writing set in – or by authors based in – Northern Ireland. One thinks most readily of Brian McGilloway and Eoin McNamee. These are novelists and novels possessed not only of a singularity of voice but also of a subject, and a velocity.
  It may simply be that there is a feeling that in Northern Ireland those who have triumphed, those who now have power, are nothing but despoilers who deserve to be humiliated and tormented. Or it may be that there is a generation of writers uniquely, tragically equipped to be able to think through complex issues of justice and mercy. Whichever: we are witnessing a clearing out of foul, Stygian stables. In Hamlet – the revenge tragedian’s revenge tragedy – the Ghost is “Doomed for a certain time to walk the night/ And for the day confined to fast in fires,/ Till the foul crimes done in days of nature/ Are burnt and purged away”. THE TWELVE is an important part of the purging. – Ian Sansom

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Declan Burke’s 10 Rules For Better Writing

These days you’re no one unless you’re offering at least 10 rules for better writing. Declan Burke (right), aka Joe No One, joins the fray. To wit:

1. Consistency
Attention to detail is very important. If you say a character has blue eyes in Chapter One, don’t say he has green eyes in Chapter Four. Unless he has greeny-blue eyes, which are greener in winter and bluer in summer. Or your story is about genetic eye experiments on human guinea-pigs. Or contact lenses. Or a David Bowie-type alien pop star.

2. Use Simple Grammar
Go easy on complicated sentence construction. Ration yourself to three commas per page and you won’t go far wrong. Apostrophes are the Devil’s own invention – first-time writers should always try to avoid plurals and possession. Unless your story is about multiple exorcisms. Or multiple orgasms.

3. Narrative Arc
Do ensure your novel has a beginning and end, as most reviewers like to read at least a sample of both.

4. Cutting The Dead Wood
It can be hugely helpful to just walk away from your novel for a while, go out into the backyard and split some logs. Not only will you get some fresh air and exercise, you’ll also get that ‘big picture’ perspective you need to squeeze that vital extra thousand words into the chapter you’re working on. And you’ll have logs for winter.

5. Naming Your Hero
It’s in your own interest to give your heroes one-syllable names. Not only will this save you valuable writing time (as opposed to, say, having to type ‘Llandudno Fetherington-Smythe III’ every time your LF-S III hoves into view), it also means your moron reader won’t have to open his or her mouth too long whilst reading, thus cutting down on the likelihood of them swallowing flies and dying of some disgusting disease (see 6), and not being around next year to buy the sequel. If the one-syllable rule constrains your artistic vision, try giving one-syllable ‘pet’ names for longer names – e.g., ‘Pet’ for ‘Petunia Fetherington-Smythe’.

6. Try To Ensure Your Readers Are All Morons
Morons are more forgiving, less judgmental and generally better for karma all round. They’re also notorious for being easily parted from their money.

7. Avoid Clichés Like the Plague
Clichés should be avoided like devastating killer epidemics transmitted by parasites carried by rats.

8. Tell, Don’t Show
People don’t have a lot of reading time these days, which is why they’re grateful when a writer, as we say in the trade, ‘cuts to the chase’. In fact, it’s probably best if you start your novel with a chase and just keep it up for 300 pages (large type). But don’t ‘blow your wad’ too early. Start with a chase on skateboards, working up to a climactic race to Saturn between space shuttles, via bicycles, jet-packs, helicopters and rocket-propelled whales.

9. Speed Is Of The Essence
Even if it’s inappropriate to your novel to have your hero addicted to amphetamines, do try to ensure your novel has pace. In THE WILD LIFE OF SAILOR AND LULA, for example, Barry Gifford called Sailor and Lula’s son Pace.

10. Don’t Be Afraid To Dumb It Down
Every aspiring writer with at least one rejection slip knows that agents, editors, publicists and publishers are all failed novelists. If the story you send them is too good, they’ll (a) steal it for themselves and make a fortune or (b) ignore it completely, for spite, so that no one benefits. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Any other suggestions, folks? Don’t be afraid to share …

On Beating Swords Into Gardening Tools

Garbhan Downey has been kind enough to offer an insight into the genesis of his latest screwball crime fiction, WAR OF THE BLUE ROSES, in which he offers ‘a novel solution to the Northern Ireland’s parades issue’.
  For those of you unfamiliar with the ‘parades issue’, it’s a phenomenon in Norn Iron in which the Loyalist Orangemen have loads of marches to celebrate the fact that they have loads of marches, whereas the Disloyalist Fenians can only muster one, on Paddy’s Day.
  Now read on …

  Two of the most dangerous moments of my life involved marching – and they both happened on the same day.
  As a newspaper reporter in Derry in August, 1995, I decided, with a cameraman, to try and get some pictures of loyalists celebrating outside the Memorial Hall, after a particularly controversial morning parade. We were scouting the revellers from about 30 yards away, when one of them spotted us. And before you could blink, an angry battalion were hurtling towards us, tearing off their sashes as they ran.
  Had it not been for a very brave RUC man, who appeared out of nowhere and stood between ourselves and the mob, the photographer and I have would have been place-kicked off the Derry walls a full 40 feet into the Bogside below. No question about it.
  Later that day, I was monitoring the afternoon parade from Butcher Street, when a notorious Antrim band broke away from the route and decided to stage an impromptu performance for 500 young people wearing Celtic tops, hemmed behind police lines. It’s hard to believe how quickly it all kicked off; but for the first time in my life I truly got the significance of the phrase “rabbit in the headlights”. On that occasion, I was hit with a bottle as I fled – but still escaped a lot lighter than most of the city-centre, which was burnt to a cinder.
  The FTQ parades, if I’m to be honest, never had quite the same edge. Possibly because they never applied to march down Ballymena High Street, so the opportunity for direct confrontation wasn’t there. But they always carried an air of menace nonetheless, right down to the band everybody hoped wouldn’t turn up, with their shaved heads, 1970s’ sunglasses and black berets.
  Not surprisingly, in idle moments, I used to wonder if there ever could be an alternative to parades. Perhaps a more productive and less volatile alternative. From what I could see, the rest of the world didn’t spend their summers marching and counter-demonstrating - so there were obviously other pursuits out there for grown men that didn’t end in nationwide arson.
  Then one evening, I was dead-heading a cloud of wild ‘bucky’ roses in my father’s garden, when an idea began to, ah, take root. Instead of spending £5 million to police this annual square-off, why doesn’t somebody take the money and sponsor a giant gardening competition? Loads of category winners, with the overall champs getting, say a big bundle of cash and the chance to design a new rose-garden for the White House.
  Complete, off-the-wall fantasy, I know. Who would ever spend their days growing flowers when there’s a chance to stage a paramilitary passing-out parade over their neighbour’s lawn? The incentive, i.e. bribe, would have to be enormous.
  Step forward a cunning Taoiseach, who suggests that if the winners of the festival produce a blue rose – the Holy Grail of the gardening world – they could be eligible for a £50 million-a-year patent. Now, we’re talking. The only condition is that anyone caught marching, counter-marching or looking sideways at another honest citizen for the months of April to September will be automatically disqualified from taking part.
  Yes, yes, I thought. What a wonderful idea. I just have to tell the world. Sadly, however, as I was speeding my way to the Parades Commission, I was waylaid by a publisher, who offered me a very small bagful of money to deliver the plan as a comedy novel instead.
  “Let’s face it,” he said, “they’d only muck it all up anyway.” Only he did not quite say muck.
  So in true Northern Ireland fashion, I took my mess of pottage and left the wider community to sort out its own business.
  As you’d expect, the characters in my new book WAR OF THE BLUE ROSES, experience their own difficulties beating swords into gardening-tools. And, as in most schemes involving the British and American governments, things never quite work out the way we were promised over praties and Jameson in the White House on St Patrick’s Day.
  All-out victory on the parade ground is swapped for all-out victory on the rose-plots. People lie, cheat and otherwise behave like the politicians they are, in the race to produce the world’s first blue rose - and capture the multi-million pound payday. Type reverts to type.
  Happily, however, in my books at least, there is always a moral compass that allows me to deal with the worst offenders in the most satisfying of manners. Sinners are punished, honest men rewarded, and skin-headed drum-bangers consigned to levels of crapulence Dante couldn’t have dreamt of.
  If only a man could get a job like that in the real world ...

Garbhan Downey’s WAR OF THE BLUE ROSES is the Hughes & Hughes Irish Book of the Month for August. Nice one, squire.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND by Ed O’Loughlin

To mark Ed O’Loughlin’s terrific achievement in being long-listed for the Booker Prize with his debut novel, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, here’s purple prose-tinged excerpt from yours truly’s review from earlier this year:

‘Has anyone seen the other half of this baby?’ he asked. ‘We mustn’t count it twice.’
  It’s a moment to make even the most hardened reader of gory novels wince, but O’Loughlin is not in the business of sensationalism. Simmons bears witness to what seems at times a daily litany of tragedy, but does so in a clipped, understated fashion. The novel has been compared with the works of V.S. Naipaul and Graham Greene, but there’s a measure of Ernest Hemingway here too. The prose is muscular and delicate, the mark of a writer who knows his own strength and is sure of his aim. In the chaos of a jungle fire-fight, ambushed by the latest in an interminable series of half-naked rebel forces, Simmons observes a jeep make “a slow and sedate turn towards us, part-sheltered by the hulk of the armoured car … its indicator piously winking.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here.
  For a Q&A with the man, clickety-click here.

Queen Crimson

Emma Louise Jordan is the latest of the Poolbeg Crimson ladies to publish a novel of ‘Romantic Suspense’, the idea being to take the best of chick lit and crime fic and create a commercial genre mash-up. Which is more or less what I tried to do with THE BIG O, and failed spectacularly to do so, very probably because I thought having a hormonally challenged flirty-something gal as one of the main characters would ‘do’ for the chick lit bit. Ah well, you live and learn.
  Anyway, Emma Louise Jordan’s novel is called BEYOND SIN, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

The picture-perfect O’Neill family is both admired and envied, near and far. But in the week leading up to Andrea O’Neill’s high-profile society wedding, life-changing trouble is suddenly brewing and sinister cracks begin to show in the previously solid foundations of the O’Neill household.
  When the bride’s angelic sister Jessie disappears from the wedding reception and is still not found days later, the finger of blame switches from person to person as the hours before her vanishing are scrambled together in a jigsaw full of missing pieces.
  Could Jessie have been living a double life, unknown to those who love her? And could anyone hate her so much that they would make her suffer the ultimate punishment for her dreadful secret sin?

  I’m saying Yes to Jessie having double life, and Yes to someone hating her that much, but I’m guessing that some gal in the book (probably not Jessie; possibly Andrea) has the kind of smarts and hidden depths that will allow Jessie to escape the ultimate punishment. Or not, depending on how unconventional Emma Louise Jordan is about her romantic suspense.
  Is it any good? Well, they liked it over at the Irish Independent …

No, You’re A Snob. No, YOU!

Apparently John Banville (right) created a bit of a to-do at Harrogate last weekend when he said that he writes the Benjamin Black novels a lot faster than he writes his John Banville novels. Stuart Evers blogs about Banville’s snobbery here, and Sarah Weinman writes about it here … No one, apparently, asked Banville himself.
  The truth about the difference between crime fiction and literary fiction, even if it’s an unpalatable one for most crime fiction fans, is that literary fiction tends to be written with more style and panache; and for those who are offended by the fact that crime novels don’t win the Booker Prize, say, well, that’s because the Booker is generally given to writers who are eloquent stylists.
  Yes, there are superb stylists writing crime fiction, just as there are wonderful storytellers writing literary fiction; but – and it’s a broad generalisation, I know – crime fiction fans tend to favour character, plot and narrative over the inventive use of language. When was the last time you read of a crime fic fan recommending an author or novel on the basis of how well it’s written? And – for the record – how well a novel is written should ALWAYS be important, regardless of what kind of novel it is intended to be.
  But aside from all of that, what’s all this nonsense about being offended because John Banville writes Benjamin Black novels quicker than he writes John Banville novels? Are crime writers and readers so insecure in their choice of reading that they need to be flattered by the literary crew? Are they so delicate in their reverse snobbery that they can’t accept criticism, be it implied, perceived or otherwise? Are they so narrow-minded that they can’t take on board a contrary point of view without resorting to name-calling and pigtail-pulling?
  To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, yet again: there are only two kinds of books, good books and bad books. And to paraphrase John Connolly: 95% of crime fiction is shit, because 95% of everything is shit.
  Anyone who knows anything about the business of writing crime fiction knows that there is one bottom line, and that’s the almighty dollar: and it’s this bottom line that results in so many functional, practical, fast-paced but ultimately bland crime fiction novels in the genre. Take a look at the best-sellers – John Grisham, Dan Brown, James Fucking Patterson.
  Seriously, people – when those three ‘writers’ are the biggest and best in the genre, don’t you think the literary crew are entitled to sneer?

UPDATE: Crime Fic Reader Rhian was at the John Banville / Reginald Hill interview at Harrogate, and took notes. If you’re interested in what was said, clickety-click here.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE HURRICANE PARTY by Klas Östergren

Klas Östergren’s contribution to the Myths series is terrific in prospect. Set in a dystopian future society (is there another kind?), it concerns itself with Hanck Orn’s search for the truth of what happened to his dead son, Toby. ‘The Clan’ responsible for his son’s death are, in fact, the Norse deities, and Hanck’s quest takes him from the Norse equivalent of Olympic heights to the very depths of their Underworld.
  The Myths series has already featured the likes of Margaret Atwood, Philip Pullman, Ali Smith and David Grossman, with Atwood, for example, offering a feminist take on THE ODYSSEY with THE PENELOPIAD. Östergren’s offering is less clearly a modern take on an old story than others, perhaps because the writer is attempting to achieve more than simply retell the old tales, perhaps because your correspondent isn’t as familiar with the Norse myths as he is with the Greek. A courageous blend of sci-fi, crime fiction and mythology, of genre sensibility and literary style, the novel opens beguilingly …
  For the rest, clickety-click here …

This Little Piggy Went To Market

Bob ‘no relation’ Burke brings a little forward-thinking and initiative to his marketing of the THIRD PIG DETECTIVE AGENCY, sending out review copies in specially designed evidence bags. A nice touch, no? I’d certainly have a second look if something like this arrived in the post. Not that that’s a hint or anything, Bob.
  Which reminds me. Bob? This island ain’t big enough for two private eyes called Harry. It’s pistols at dawn in the misty Russian dawn for you, squire. If I’m not there, start without me.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE BIG EMPTY by Declan Burke

God bless the interweb, I say, where a man can have a novel reviewed even though it’s never been published. Corey Wilde over at The Drowning Machine was kind enough to request a Word document of THE BIG EMPTY, a sequel to EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, when I mentioned in passing that I was planning to upload it to Kindle. As it happens, I decided while giving the story one final proof-through that I wouldn’t upload it to Kindle, that I’d release it into the wild to do some scavenging and see if it mightn't bring home any bacon. I’ll keep you posted, although I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you …
  In the meantime, you’ve no idea of exactly how good life would be right now if Corey Wilde was CEO of World Publishing. To wit:

SYNOPSIS: Ex-con Harry Rigby drives a cab, mules a small amount of grass, and now and again he acts as father figure to his young nephew, Ben. An odd kind of a father figure, because Harry killed his brother, Ben’s father. That’s how Harry got to be a con in the first place. When Harry delivers some grass to an acquaintance named Finn Hamilton, he’s just in time to witness Finn’s nine-floor swan dive. Suddenly everyone wants something from Harry: the cops, Finn’s shyster lawyer and accompanying goon, Finn’s sexually combustible mama and his more-than-a-smidgen dysfunctional sister with the long claws. For Harry, keeping himself alive while trying to get his hands on Finn’s much sought after laptop and gun is one thing. Protecting the one person he loves most, that’s a whole different problem.

REVIEW: I miss having a photo of a book jacket to post at the top left of my review. That’s because there is no book jacket for THE BIG EMPTY. I’m sure the publishers put it down to the recession that they haven’t found a place for this sharply funny, jaggedly violent tale of a man walking a tightrope above a twisty canyon of family deceit and dirty money. Whatever the reason, recession or otherwise, it’s a shame. Declan Burke writes with a razor wit so fine that the reader feels the sting of a thousand cuts by the end of Harry’s journey ...
  Burke creates a palate of characters to root for or against, or even just to marvel at. The late Finn’s femme fatale mother is a devious creature whose literary ancestry hearkens back to female characters produced by Raymond Chandler and Tennessee Williams. Solicitor Gillick, Finn’s shyster, conjures up images of Orson Welles in ‘Touch of Evil.’ Ben is no cardboard child; he’s a breath of fresh air, being both as smart and aware as only a 10-year-old can be, and at the same time as naive as one would expect (or at least hope for) from a child his age; slightly rebellious but still more obedient than he will be at fifteen. He’s a kid you can love because he’s genuine, being neither a plaster saint nor the demon seed. And that’s true of Harry as well. The reader can believe in Harry as much for his failings as for his strengths. And when Harry has been pushed to his limits, when he finally is bent on payback, prefixing ‘Dirty’ to his name would not be a misnomer. He does some things I’ve myself wanted to do to a lawyer or two. And it doesn’t hurt that Harry cracks wiser than Philip Marlowe.
  The pace and tension ratchet up with every complication or obstacle Harry encounters. And the author wisely opted to give Harry enough native wit to parry and sort out the tightly knitted problems and mysteries rather than relying on chance or the one lone missing miracle clue that suddenly ties it all together. Life is not so neat as Jessica Fletcher would have her viewers believe. Some of the mysteries and puzzles may be solved by this story’s end, but no one’s life is ever going to be as it was, and some mysteries may never be solved. Beyond the wisecracking and the hot tempo, this book has a heart easily wounded. Harry Rigby is that heart. The reader, and Harry, are left in no doubt that where there are wounds, there will be scars.
  Can it really be recession that’s keeping a fast, witty work of crime fic like this off the bookstore shelves? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe Harry Rigby, or someone like him, should have a little talk with the publishers. - Corey Wilde

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: TRUE CRIME: AN AMERICAN ANTHOLOGY, ed. Harold Schechter

This anthology is an important contribution to the understanding and chronicling of true crime reporting in the US by contemporaneous authors.
  It ranges from 1651 (the hanging of John Billington) to 2001 (the trial of the Menendez brothers for murdering their parents.
  Billington was on the first ship from England to the Plymouth Colony and was regarded by everyone on board as depraved and boorish, so no one was surprised when he killed a fellow Plymouth Brethern some years later over a trivial incident.
  The Menendez brothers shot their parents to death in the family home in Elm Drive, an affluent address in Beverly Hills, with fourteen twelve-gauge shotgun rounds that obliterated the parents’ heads and torsos.
  Other stories covered include Ed Gein (the basis for the movie Psycho), the Son of Sam, the Black Dahlia murder, the Turner-Stompanato (self-defence) killing and the Loeb and Leopold (Superman) case.
  The quality of the writing across the centuries and decades is very engaging and high calibre. The styles are varied and often attain high art. Some are straight narratives, some are social commentaries, some are psychological analysis, some are essays on guilt and evidence.
  The cases in the book run the gamut from the obscure to the high celebrity ones. The authors include well known crime writers like Herbert Ashbury, Theodore Dreiser, Jim Thompson, Jack Webb, Robert Bloch, Truman Capote, James Ellroy, Ann Rule and Dominick Dunne in addition to writers like Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Mark Twain and Damon Runyon.
  The editor, Dr. Harold Schechter, a professor of American Literature and Culture, at Queen's College in New York, has written a masterful introduction which delineates the growth of true crime reportage, the seminal influence of IN COLD BLOOD, and the basis of true crime for authors of crime fiction such as Dashiell Hammett, Joyce Carol Oates and James Ellroy. Schechter is also the author of many books on true crime and crime fiction.
  One major bonus of this book is the introduction to each piece written by Schechter and the primary and secondary sources that he lists for stories.
  The only major deficit, for a book published in 2008, is the dearth of modern coverage. The newest writing dates from 2001.
  For crime writing later than 2001, the annual series, The Best American Crime Reporting, is essential. These volumes are a lucid and comprehensive documentation of the best in US true crime writing. (Best American Crime Reporting 2009 is due for publication Sep 15th 2009 – a review to follow on publication).
  TRUE CRIME: AN AMERICAN ANTHOLOGY, however, remains an essential volume in understanding the genesis and exposition of crime reporting as a legitimate specialization within journalism and creative non-fiction. – Seamus Scanlon

A Bloom By Any Other Name

Further to Adrian McKinty getting lumps kicked out of his latest novel, FIFTY GRAND, in the Irish Times this week, and in the interest of balance, we present a little nugget that slipped through the net from last month, in which Fintan O’Toole gits jiggy with James Joyce’s ULYSSES in – oh yes! – the Irish Times. To wit:

Is there a middle way between solemn worship on the one side and touristic antics on the other? How about thrillers? Anyone who can read a good thriller is half way towards being able to enjoy ULYSSES. Murder stories have a lot in common with Joyce’s masterpiece. They venture down the mean streets of the city. Their plots depend on a concentrated unfolding of time in which everything has to be carefully sequenced. Chance encounters acquire significance. The city, unknown at first, gradually yields up its hidden mysteries.
  This is why thriller writers have long been drawn to ULYSSES and also why thrillers can serve as excellent introductions to the book. Adrian McKinty’s recent hard-boiled, fast-paced THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD is as dark and violent as any thriller fan could demand, but it also serves as an intelligent homage to ULYSSES – not so much to its content as to Joyce’s way of telling a story …

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

The Man With The PLAN

I know nothing about Bill Folman, author of THE SCANDAL PLAN, but I do feel his pain. Here, courtesy of the Harper Studio, is a little movie about debut novelist Folman’s attempts to scrape up a little publicity and sell a couple of books. The good news is, it’s very funny - especially the bit where Bill is advised to ‘go on Oprah’. I’ve had someone advise me to cut faffing around with blogging and whatnot, and just go on TV and plug the book … and this from a person who is a published author. Anyway, the bad news is, Bill Folman has just raised the bar for promo-seeking debutant novelists to the kind of standards that might well give Olympic pole vaulters nose-bleeds. Roll it there, Collette …

Jacobean Mayhem, Gothic Noir

After the debacle of the Adrian McKinty review yesterday, it’s nice to report that there are still some reviewers out there whose heads aren’t jammed up their fundament. First, Glenn Harper of International Noir on Declan Hughes’ latest, ALL THE DEAD VOICES:

“The plot goes off in some unexpected directions: just when you think you’re headed for a predictable or operatic crescendo, Hughes undercuts that expectation with casual violence or the withdrawal of an expected twist. And at the end, amid the nearly Jacobean mayhem, there’s a hint of redemption for Loy and those around him.”

  Very nice indeed – and why-oh-why did they pull the plug on the trippy cover? It’s Cover of the Year for yours truly so far (hat-tip to Glenn Harper for the image) ... Oh, and is John Connolly about to rebrand himself, a la Colin Bateman, as ‘Jon Connolly’? Say it ain’t so, Jon, sorry, John …
  Meanwhile, over at The Independent, Rebecca Armstrong likes John Connolly’s THE LOVERS:

“It’s not all crooks and spooks; Connolly is far too skilled a writer to create mere schlock-horror. He’s at his best getting inside his characters’ heads … Connolly’s latest novel is unashamedly gothic, but ultimately manages to be believable and moving too.”

  I couldn’t agree more. If THE GATES is half as good, it’ll be a vintage year for Connolly fans …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Chris Mooney

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?
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. It’s the perfect thriller. And Hannibal Lecter is the most interesting, captivating villain.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Jack Reacher. He kicks ass and always gets the woman. Captain Kirk would be a close second. And he has those cool phasers . . .

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I love this question. I’m about to finish the last book of the Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series – the basis for the HBO show True Blood. I’m not a fan of vampire books, but I was curious about this and man-oh-man I wasn’t disappointed. They’re great, fun reads. Can’t recommend them enough.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Working with Richard Marek on my first book, DEVIANT WAYS. Richard was the editor of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and he taught me everything I need to know about how to write a good, solid thriller.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Anything from John Connolly’s Charlie Parker series. If I had to pick one, I’d say THE KILLING KIND. That book scared me to death.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I’d have to go with John Connolly’s THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS. It’s such a beautiful novel, and it really showcases John’s sense of humour.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is the middle of the book. That’s where I get stuck more often than not, and it’s at that point I’m usually telling myself I have no business doing this for a living. It’s hell for a while, then I finally see the light and start moving toward the end. The best thing? Those moments I call “happy accidents.” In THE MISSING, I had a specific ending in mind. As I was writing, that little voice in my head said, “What if you did such and such?” The idea stopped me dead in my tracks it was so frightening. I love those moments.

The pitch for your next book is …?
It’s another Darby McCormick book called THE LIVING DEAD. Here’s the pitch: What if kids are abducted, disappear for ten or twenty years, and then suddenly show up as killers?

Who are you reading right now?
I’m just finishing up Gregg Hurwitz’s TRUST NO ONE. It’s a thriller. Great writing, great plot, and a fantastic ending. Loved it from start to finish.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I’d have to go with writing. It’s more rewarding.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Fast, furious and terrifying.

Chris Mooney’s THE DEAD ROOM is published by Penguin

The Revolution Will Be Televised, With Endorsements

Kudos yet again to the Irish Times for its Book of the Day review slot, although today’s offering was a terrible review of Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND. By which I mean, the reviewer didn’t like the novel, but the review itself was terrible. It kicks off like this:

SERIOUS CRIME fiction these days is a fickle gamble, especially for newer writers. Genre boundaries have become blurred. Crime thriller enthusiasts are perhaps among the hardest readers to impress because of their love for both the list of illustrious luminaries and equally because of the powerful abilities of this same elite to bring their main characters to life. It’s called character stamina …

  Leaving aside ‘character stamina’ (?), what’s all this about ‘crime thriller enthusiasts’? Do those who love chick lit not have a list of illustrious luminaries? What about sci-fi lovers – don’t they have their own geniuses? Do not those who prefer literary fiction, or poetry, love their luminaries for their ability to bring their characters to life?
  The review goes downhill from there, losing wheels at a rate of knots. This bit stands out, though:

Some of Hollywood’s hottest names pop up in the storyline, including Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Matthew Broderick. Seeing their names made me increasingly uncomfortable as to how they might feel about being associated with the image of the resort’s labour conditions, bent sheriff and sleazy drug dealers.

  Happily, the reviewer was in no way uncomfortable with trashing a brilliant writer’s novel on the basis that he, the reviewer, preferred the works of Jeffrey Deaver and David Baldacci.
  Seriously, some days you’d wonder why you bother your hole.
  And then, just when you think the day can’t get any worse, the ever-fragrant Sarah Weinman pops up with the worst cover (see above) in the history of publishing.
  It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better, people …

Sheer Geneius

Gene Kerrigan is one of the finest Irish novelists around at the moment, in CAP’s not-so-humble opinion, and those of you who haven’t read his latest offering, DARK TIMES IN THE CITY – which, I suspect, is most of you – should hasten to your nearest bookstore and purchase it forthwith, sparing not the horses, James.
  I’m also rather fond of Gene Kerrigan’s columns on the back page of the Sunday Independent, which have taken on something of a quixotic poignancy in recent times, as he vainly tilts against the windmills of Ireland’s entrenched vested interests. The most recent subject of his ire is the McCarthy Report. To wit:

It’s like we’re all on a lifeboat. At one end of the lifeboat, we’re being told that things are so bad that we must choose which amongst us is to be served up as dinner, so that the rest won’t all perish.
  And, from the other end of the lifeboat, we can hear the enormous farts from the bloated arses of the Very Serious People, on the fourth course of their blow-out.
  As this column said before, this battle is about the quality of wine on the dinner tables of the elite. People who routinely uncork a €48 bottle of wine will, indeed, make sacrifices in our hour of peril. They’ll settle for a €36 bottle of plonk. But they’re damned if they’ll slum it with a crappy €22 bottle.

  Geneius. For the rest, clickety-click here ...
  The McCarthy Report, for those of you interested, is a report on where savings can be made in the Government’s public sector wage bill. It targets, for the most part, education, health and essential services – one proposal, for example, suggests closing down half the rural Garda stations.
  Here’s the situation in Ireland:
  A Fianna Fail-led government has been in power for over a decade;
  We’ve gone from boom to bust in the last three years;
  The same government who led us into the tailspin are now proposing to pull us out;
  They propose to achieve this by commissioning a report from a group of people who are ideologically wedded to the economic model that got us bust in the first place;
  The overall aim is to reassert the status quo, although possibly with more safety-nets built in for the very wealthy individuals whose greed caused the bust in the first place;
  The cost of paying for the stupid greed of a gilded elite will be picked up by the taxpayer, and the taxpayer’s children, and very probably the taxpayer’s grandchildren, because the government insists on bailing out useless, rotten banks by investing billions that could be spent on education, health, and essential services.
  Meanwhile, the opposition parties clamour for an election, pretending that they want to be in charge of the fiasco, but no one seems prepared to say that it’s the system that’s at fault; that it’s the system that has provided us with a generation of utterly useless politicians, bankers and captains of industry; that it’s the system that needs to change. Otherwise we’re just shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic.
  My father, bless his heart, is no political or economic savant. But for as long as I can remember, going back to the early ’80s, when it was clear to everyone with eyes to see that Charles J. Haughey was filthy to the core, my father was saying, “We need to ask Fidel to come over and sort us out.” A benign dictatorship was what he was proposing, in effect. And you can laugh if you want to, but answer me this: with Ireland on its way to hell in a hand-basket, broke and bust and borrowing billions at a punitive rate of interest just to keep up with the day-to-day spending, this a few short years after the Celtic Tiger was roaring all over the world, at anyone who’d listen, about how wonderful the Irish economy was – answer me this: how much worse of a job would Fidel Castro have done at managing the Irish economy than Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen?

It’s Not Easy Being Green

I’m only grumbling because I wasn’t invited, of course, but there’s a touch of the tired old blarney about ‘Emerald Noir’, next Saturday morning’s panel on Irish crime writing at Harrogate, which will be moderated by Ruth ‘Cuddly’ Dudley Edwards (right). Quoth the Harrogate interweb malarkey:

Crime fiction is for many identified with big, brash urban landscapes, but some of the hottest properties in contemporary crime fiction come from and write about the greenest of all lands, Ireland. But what is it about the Emerald Isle that makes it the perfect place for crime of all types? Four top names – Declan Hughes, Gene Kerrigan, Ava McCarthy and Brian McGilloway – talk about their influences and background, the importance of landscape and history, and the place of politics and religion in their work with veteran (and often controversial) commentator on Irish life, Ruth Dudley Edwards.

  Now, Ireland may be green in places, certainly, but Hughes and McCarthy both set their novels for the most part in Dublin, while it’s debatable as to whether city boy Gene Kerrigan has ever seen a real field in his entire life. Turf bogs and boreens aren’t a notable feature of Ruth Dudley Edwards’ novels, either.
  I’m not sure if any of the writers involved write ‘about’ Ireland. They may set their novels here, but that’s not necessarily the same as writing about the place. The stories they write aren’t unique to their setting, and to the extent that they use current and recent Irish events for backdrop, they function as implicit criticisms of an urban existence that could apply to most cities anywhere in the world. Even Brian McGilloway, who sketches the distinctive rural hinterland of Donegal and Derry with some aplomb, is writing stories that could apply to most international borders, and particularly those borders between countries with a history of conflict.
  This is a good thing, I think. I like it that these writers are of a generation confident enough to get their heads up and have a good look around, and write stories that aren’t necessarily beholden to their place. There was a time when being an ‘Irish writer’ meant writing about Ireland, which makes a certain amount of sense given that the country is a relatively young one, and still trying to establish an identity; by the same token, it smacked of the insularity of self-consciousness and maybe even an inferiority complex.
  Happily, that’s no longer the case. There’s no reason why a crime novel needs to be ‘about’ its setting any more than a crime novel needs to be some kind of political statement, or social commentary.
  That caveat aside, the ‘Emerald Noir’ panel looks like – no, hold up, there’s another caveat. About this time last month, when I first looked in on the Harrogate website, said ‘Emerald Noir’ entry included Ken Bruen. Erm, where’s Sir Kenneth of Bruen, folks? Was he waylaid on the way to the festival? Will there be a ransom demand any time soon? Talk to us – we can be the honest broker in this deal …
  Where was I? Oh yes, Ruth Dudley Edwards, and AFTERMATH, her new book about the Omagh atrocity. Clickety-click over here for some pics of the launch party, and a rather interesting video of Peter Mandelson trying to be humble. No kidding, it looks like Mandy’s about to turn inside-out and in the process rip a hole in the space-time continuum.
  And while we’re on the subject of Harrogate et al, John Banville may or may not be in Benjamin Black mode for his conversation with Reginald Hill, scheduled for Friday evening, 8pm, but if you’re in the vicinity, I urge you to go. His new Banville novel, THE INFINITIES, is due out this autumn, and it sounds like an absolute cracker, and if my experience of interviewing him is anything to go by, he’s funny, self-deprecating and occasionally illuminating about the business of writing. Not everyone will agree with me, I know, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles …
  Finally, it’s still not too late to VOTE FOR DECLAN HUGHES for Crime Novel of the Year. You know it makes sense …

The (Other) Captain Blood Rides Again!

I mentioned BARBELO’S BLOOD a week or so ago, BB being the debut offering of some maverick and to date pseudonymous genius going by the nom de plume of ‘Captain Barbelo’. I’m assured that all will be revealed – or the good Captain's identity, at least – at the launch of said tome, which takes place on Thursday evening, 6pm, at Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop in Galway. Rumour has it that Ken Bruen may pop in to say a few words, but don’t take my word for that …
  Anyway, here’s the first few pages of BARBELO’S BLOOD. Remind you of anyone …?

Chapter Zero: Rude Awakenings

The scent of ionised concrete; the underpass, dripping the evening rain, drumming a hundred regrets into my brain.
  “Alright granddad?”
  “Good evening young man, please stand aside – ach!”
  His forearm pins my throat to the wall, his blade flashes under my nose.
  “Stand aside? Oi oi, the old fool’s losing his marbles; thinks he’s fuckin’ Charles Bronson!”
  Cold laughter booms from the shadows, another two young’uns come into view.
  Time slows, my senses quicken.
  “Oh please,” I rasp, “please don’t hurt me, let me go home.”
  “Empty ya fucking pockets!”
  I slipped my memorial pen out of my breast pocket, held up in front of his face.
  “It’s gold plated. It’s all I have. Please, I’m too old for this, I’m not a well man.”
  “Let’s have a butcher’s then, ay?”
  Reaching to grab my pen, his cutthroat razor slipped, slashing my hand – Blood!
  My blood.
  Everything has a price, we’ve all gotta pay tribute, we’ve all gotta pay our dues. Even me – and I’d not seen blood on my hands for over twenty years.
  “Oopsy-daisy, sorry ’bout that, granddad, it was—”
  It was the last thing this cunt said – my pen drives hard into his eye socket, my walking stick slaps into his groin.
  Screaming onto his knees, dragging me down with him, again and again I drove my memorial pen into his eyes.
  It was easy logic, a religious matter, my Gawd-given right!
  It was over quicker than a blink.

Chapter 1: Easy Logic

Bloody hell, I was only going home from the pub, I was.
  Fuck’s sake.
  Eighty-two years a scholar and a gent, I am. Scholar on account I talk a lot of sense, and gent on account I knows when to keep schtum.
  Mr Barbelo.
  Just another old cunt, deep in his own private perdition down his Brixton local. Ever chance The Effra Tavern in the early 1980s?
  You might recall I always did you the courtesy of a smile at the bar, or at least a nod on the way out. Think back. Geezer with the Trilby hat; three-pint man, always left around half nine before the gaff got mobbed with young’uns…?
  Didn’t think so.

Tap, tap, tap, went my misery cane, echoing through the underpass, drip, drip, splash, went the concrete roof, like it always did. And I thought about my tower block, the elevator, rattling the stink of urine up to my empty flat – and I thought, maybe one of these nights it won’t stop, maybe it’ll just keep going up, and up through the roof, into the starry sky, hurtling over the moon all the way to Happy Place, where people like me find peace at last, and shoot guns, riding on clouds…
  The twentieth floor is the farthest you’ll find anybody on my block, where the Dixons nest, burrow, and fester – nasty South London family the lot of them. And a floor below, Barbelo returns, and slumbers, dreaming my nightmares into the greasy-grey dawn.
  Every night, except this night; the lamb returns as the lion, or doesn’t return at all.
  Self-educated, I am, always had the knack for easy logic, but three of them, one of me? And my memorial pen. Hardly rocket science, is it? Three of the gawky, brain-dead cunts, versus me.
  I suppose I should be thankful for the wakeup call. Truth was, I’d been pegging the path of the walking dead a long time.

He bled, hard. He screamed even harder. Nah, no regrets. My pen was mightier than Excalibur when I struck his eyes again, and again.
  The other two ran from the slaughter – splish, splash, huff through the underpass – but if they’d only paused to ponder… just how old I was, just how much my stiff little fingers ached, well, perhaps they could’ve helped their friend. If friend he was. Whatever this soggy bloody mess in my arms was to these junkies.
  A true friend does not die alone. Never. I know, because friends I had, once…
  So I left him where he lay. The underpass was his tomb, and my resurrection. Tapped my cane home, numb, nothing hurt; it never does at first, and so I sang,
  “Raise the scarlet standard flying high, beneath its folds we’ll live and die…”
  Tap, tap, tap. I was covered in my scarlet flag alright. My pen was mighty, but his blade was sharp. I was cut, not as bad as he should have cut me, ay? Should’ve done the job in proper order, if he was gonna start. In for a penny, in for a pound – first rule of combat, first rule of any craft: follow through, always.
  Silly bunny.
  I don’t recall getting home. I only knows that when I did, I felt – fuck me sideways, yeah – I felt good!

  © Captain Barbelo, 2009

Book Covers – You’re The Judge

A little help and/or advice required, folks, if you can spare the time … The three covers below (designed by JT Lindroos) are in the running for the cover of the Kindle version of CRIME ALWAYS PAYS (which is set for a goodly part on a Greek island), and while there’s things I like about all three, I’m not entirely certain about any of them. Any thoughts? All feedback welcome …

ANIMAL FARM II: This Time It’s Jewish!

I’ve never much liked Yann Martel (right), it has to be said. Not sure why. It’s certainly nothing to do with the allegations that he plagiarised whole chunks of THE LIFE OF PI. Possibly it’s the precious irrelevance of the floating zoo.
  It’s always nice to have your prejudices confirmed, isn’t it? Martel’s latest novel, the follow-up to the floating zoo story, is (koff) an allegory about the Holocaust for which he’s being paid three million dollars. Quoth the New York Times:

It relates the story of an encounter between a famous writer and a taxidermist who is writing a play that features dialogue between a donkey and a monkey, both imprinted on a shirt.
  “I’ve noticed over the years of reading books on the Holocaust and seeing movies that it’s always represented in the same way, which is historical or social realism,” Mr. Martel, 46, said in a telephone interview from his home in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. “I was thinking that it was interesting that you don’t have many imaginative takes on it like George Orwell’s ANIMAL FARM and its take on Stalinism.”

  Okay, but can I stop you right there squire? One: you’re no George Orwell. Two, the murder of six million-plus people in an industrialised death machine doesn’t need ‘imaginative takes’. Three, you don’t have a lot of ‘imaginative takes’ on Stalinism, do you? Four, what, if anything, is your ‘imaginative take’ on the Holocaust designed to achieve, exactly?
  Mind you, shallow bastard that I am, that’s not the most irritating aspect of the NYT’s report. Apparently Martel is being paid a cool three million dollars for the donkey-monkey classic. Is he happy?

  Mr. Martel also declined to discuss his advance, but said, “Frankly, with all the years it took to write this book, if you amortize it out, it’s not as much as one would like it to be.”

  Given that the floating zoo won the Booker seven years ago, we can presume the donkey-monkey opus took roughly eight years to write. Which works out at about roughly €370,000 per year, when you ‘amortize it out’.
  Now, I know the dollar has seen better days, but still – nearly four hundred grand a year to write some wankery allegorical bullshit, during a recession when people’s homes are being repossessed at an unprecedented rate, and the asshole still isn’t happy?
  If at some point in the far future you stop and look around and scratch your head and say, ‘Hey, whatever happened to literary fiction? Some of it was actually okay’, just remember the moron with the donkey-monkey dialogues who wasn’t happy with a three million dollar advance he wouldn’t be able to pay back in four lifetimes of trying.

It Matters Not How Strait THE GATES …

I’m loving the strap on John Connolly’s THE GATES, which runs: “The Gates of Hell are About to Open. Mind the Gap.”
  A comic novel about Satanism and quantum physics? Roll on October … Mind you, given the impending anti-blasphemy legislation, there’s every chance THE GATES will mange to get itself banned in Ireland. Boo, etc.
  Meanwhile, JC has posted up the first chapter of THE GATES over at his interweb malarkey, to wit:

Chapter One
In Which We Encounter a Small Boy, His Dog, and Some People Who Are Up To No Good

On the night in question, Mr Abernathy answered the door to find a small figure dressed in a white sheet standing on his porch. The sheet had two holes cut into it at eye level so that the small figure could walk around without bumping into things, a precaution that seemed wise given that the small figure was also wearing rather thick glasses. The glasses were balanced on its nose outside the sheet, giving it the appearance of a short-sighted, and not terribly frightening, ghost. A mismatched pair of sneakers, the left blue, the right red, poked out from the bottom of the sheet.
  In its left hand, the figure held an empty bucket. From its right stretched a dog leash, ending at a red collar that encircled the neck of a little dachshund. The dachshund stared up at Mr Abernathy with what Mr Abernathy felt was a troubling degree of self-awareness. If he hadn’t know better, Mr Abernathy might have taken the view that this was a dog that knew it was a dog, and wasn’t very happy about it, all things considered. Equally, the dog also appeared to know that Mr Abernathy was not a dog (for, in general, dogs view humans as just very large dogs that have learned the neat trick of walking on two legs, which only impresses dogs for a very short period of time). This suggested to Mr Abernathy that here was a very smart dog indeed—freakishly so. There was something disapproving in the way the dog was staring at Mr Abernathy. Mr Abernathy sensed that the dog was not terribly keen on him, and he found himself feeling both annoyed, and slightly depressed, that he had somehow disappointed the animal.
  Mr Abernathy looked from the dog to the small figure, then back again, as though unsure which one of them was going to speak.
  “Trick or treat,” said the small figure eventually, from beneath the sheet.
  Mr Abernathy’s face betrayed utter bafflement.
  “What?” said Mr Abernathy.
  “Trick or treat,” the small figure repeated.
  Mr Abernathy’s mouth opened once, then closed again. He looked like a fish having an afterthought. He appeared to grow even more confused. He glanced at his watch, and checked the date, wondering if he had somehow lost a few days between hearing the doorbell ring, and opening the door.
  “It’s only October the twenty-eighth,” he said.
  “I know,” said the small figure. “I thought I’d get a head start on everyone else.”
  “What?” said Mr Abernathy again.
  “What?” said the small figure.
  “Why are you saying “what”?”, said Mr Abernathy. “I just said “what”.”
  “I know. Why?”
  “Why what?”
  “My question exactly,” said the small figure.
  “Who are you?” asked Mr Abernathy. His head was starting to hurt.
  “I’m a ghost,” said the small figure, then added, a little uncertainly: “Boo?”
  “No, not ‘What are you?’ Who are you?”
  “Oh.” The small figure removed the glasses and lifted up its sheet, revealing a pale boy of perhaps eleven, with wispy blond hair and very blue eyes. “I’m Samuel Johnson. I live in number five hundred and one. And this is Boswell,” he added, indicating the dachshund by raising his leash.
  Mr Abernathy, who was new to the town, nodded, as though this piece of information had suddenly confirmed all of his suspicions. Upon hearing its name spoken, the dog shuffled its bottom on Mr Abernathy’s porch and gave a bow. Mr Abernathy regarded it suspiciously.
  “Your shoes don’t match,” said Mr Abernathy to Samuel.
  “I know. I couldn’t decide which pair to wear, so I wore one of each.”
  Mr Abernathy raised an eyebrow. He didn’t trust people, especially children, who displayed signs of individuality.
  “So,” said Samuel. “Trick or treat?”
  “Neither,” said Mr Abernathy.
  “Why not?”
  “Because it’s not Halloween yet, that’s why not.”
  “But I was showing initiative.” Samuel’s teacher, Mr Hume, often spoke about the importance of showing initiative, although any time Samuel showed initiative Mr Hume seemed to disapprove of it, which Samuel found very puzzling.
  “No, you weren’t,” said Mr Abernathy. “You’re just too early. It’s not the same thing.”
  “Oh, please. A chocolate bar?”
  “No.”
  “Not even an apple?”
  “No.”
  “I can come back tomorrow, if that helps.”
  “No! Go away.”
  With that, Mr Abernathy slammed the front door, leaving Samuel and Boswell to stare at the flaking paintwork. Samuel let the sheet drop down once more, restoring himself to ghostliness, and replaced his. He looked down at Boswell. Boswell looked up at him. Samuel shook the empty bucket sadly.
  “It seemed like a good idea,” he said to Boswell. “I thought people might like an early fright.”
  Boswell sighed in response, as if to say: “I told you so.”
  Samuel gave one final, hopeful glance at Mr Abernathy’s front door, willing him to change his mind and appear with something for the bucket, even if it was just a single, solitary nut, but the door remained firmly closed. The Abernathys hadn’t lived on the street for very long, and their house was the biggest and oldest in town. Samuel had rather hoped that the Abernathys would decorate it for Halloween, or perhaps turn it into a haunted house, but after his recent encounter with Mr Abernathy he didn’t think this was very likely. Mr Abernathy’s wife, meanwhile, always looked like she had just been fed a very bitter slice of lemon, and was looking for somewhere to spit it out discreetly. No, thought Samuel, the Abernathy house would not be playing a very big part in this year’s Halloween festivities.
  As things turned out, he was very, very wrong.

  © John Connolly, 2009

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: FROZEN RIVER

Desperate to make ends meet, mother-of-two Ray (Melissa Leo) joins forces with local Mohawk Lila (Misty Upham) to smuggle illegal immigrants across the border between the US and Canada. In theory it should be easy: the Mohawk reservation extends across the border, and the local police have no jurisdiction on Mohawk land, but the frozen river the women need to cross while transporting their illicit cargo is the least treacherous obstacle in their way. A superb performance from Melissa Leo carries what might have been a standard noir tale, although what gives writer-director Courtney Hunt’s story an unconventional edge are the female leads, resulting in a downbeat and desolate Thelma and Louise. Ray and Lila aren’t out for post-feminist kicks, though – they break the law because they need to eat, and it’s the domestic aspect to Ray’s downward spiral that gives Frozen River its poignant edge, while a couple of scenes – particularly the one with the ‘misplaced’ baby – are truly heartbreaking. Shot crisply, cheaply but effectively, and with a good eye for the hauntingly bleak surroundings of northern New York State, this is as good a crime movie as you’ll see all year. ****

A Good Year For The ROSES

“I guess the reason we’re not talking / There’s so little left to say / We haven’t said …” So warbled Elvis Costello in A Good Year for the Roses, a sentiment that wouldn’t cut much mustard with Garbhan Downey right now. For lo! The author of WAR OF THE BLUE ROSES is rabbiting all over the interweb. Here he is on Culture Northern Ireland:

From the outside 2009 looks like a vintage year for political satirists: expenses scandals rumbling on in Westminster, our own MLAs claims coming under ever greater press and public scrutiny, economic meltdown after years of hubris. ‘But I’d say it’s the opposite - there has never been a harder time to be a satirist’, says Garbhan Downey, a writer who has spent the best part of a decade ripping it out of the political classes on both sides of the border. ‘All these revelations just prove that the real world is so much stranger than anything a novelist could come up with.’

 Truth is stranger than fiction shocker! A pity the truth wouldn’t be half as funny as Garbhan Downey once in a while, but sure you can’t have everything. Anyway, where would you put it, etc. Meanwhile, here’s Garbhan over at the Irish Echo:

“There’s a few things I don’t like about America: nukes, twelve years of the Bush family, illegal renditions. Plus the fact that, for some reason, I can never quite fathom, my home television is now stuck for eight hours a day on the Disney Channel.
  “My novel WAR OF THE BLUE ROSES - though a comedy - picks up on some of these complaints.
  “But it also looks at the age-old kinship and friendship between our two countries, as personified by the taoiseach and the new U.S. president, when they meet up in the White House on the opening page.
  “In the book, the “bromance” between Ireland and the U.S. culminates in the Yanks sponsoring a massive flower-growing competition outside Derry, this to take some of the sting out of the Marching Season.”

  Ah, Norn Iron – the only place where you can still have a March in summer. Finally, here’s Downey over at Crime Scene Norn Iron:

“I thought I’d give McKinty a go because Gerard Brennan clearly rated him – and Ger, along with Peter [Rozovsky] and Dec [Modesty Forbids], is one of the few reviewers I still respect. If they have an angle, I don’t see it. And I say that as someone who has spent his life in journalism looking out for angles.”

  As I’ve told anyone who’ll listen, my angle is I’m in it for the money, the free books and the complimentary reacharounds. Anyway, and while we’re on the subject of Adrian McKinty and/or gobby Norn Ironers, here’s McKinty in the Times introducing his Top 10 Female Sleuths:

“As much as any hairy, beer drinking male can be I believe that I am in touch with my feminine side. I ride a girl’s bicycle, I went to a women’s college at Oxford and I have seen several episodes of Sex and the City (though I am not willing to admit the exact number for fear of damaging my hard-boiled crime writing credentials). As a kid in Northern Ireland I had two older sisters who kept me out of trouble and now I have two young daughters whose agenda is precisely the opposite. I grew up in an era of impressive female role models (Charlie’s Angels, The Bionic Woman, Mrs Thatcher) so I have never had a problem enjoying female protagonists in fiction, especially in detective fiction which became my go-to genre. Now that I have written a XX chromosomed detective in my book FIFTY GRAND, I thought I would share my own idiosyncratic list of 10 favourite female gumshoes …”

  Erm, no Foxy Brown in there, squire?
  Finally, and as this will probably be the only CAP post to reference Elvis Costello and Margaret Thatcher, here’s Costello’s touching paean to the Iron Lady, Tramp the Dirt Down. Roll it there, Collette …

TWO-WAY SPLIT: Killing With Kindleness

Good news and bad news, folks – the good news is that Allan Guthrie’s terrific TWO-WAY SPLIT is available in yet another format, the Kindle, which means it’s likely to knock the socks off a whole new audience. Better still, it’ll cost you the princely sum of $1.25! Huzzah!
  For that all-essential Crime Always Pays take on TWO-WAY SPLIT, clickety-click here … but be warned – those of you with an aversion to purple prose should resist the temptation to click thru, the better to avoid lines like, “The result is a gut-knotting finale that unfurls with the inevitability of all great tragedy and the best nasty sex – it’ll leave you devastated, hollowed out, aching to cry and craving more.”
  The bad news? Well, it’s a kick in the nuts to see the likes of TWO-WAY SPLIT being offered at $1.25. I mean, the novel won the Theakston’s Old Peculier, and it’s a wonderful novel, noir or otherwise. How’s a man supposed to earn a living when his best work is on sale at the knock-down, low-low, bargain basement price of $1.25? Eh?
  I should probably declare a variety of interests here, before I go any further: Allan Guthrie is my agent; I’m planning on uploading a novel to Kindle in the very near future; I haven’t had any great tragedy or nasty sex recently; and I am, in fact – mwah-hah-hah!!! – Allan Guthrie.
  Seriously, though – I’ll earn more this month from freelance writing (reviews of movies, theatre and books, mostly, with some features and interviews tossed in) than I’ve earned in the last 18 months from writing fiction. And this month isn’t a particularly terrific month, it’s average enough. So you tell me – with a baby girl in the house needing food, nappies, clothes and new shoes (the girl loves her shoes!), what’s the point in trying to write fiction? Or, let me rephrase that – What’s the point in writing terrific fiction (which I do, modesty and all aside) and trying to sell it, and very probably winding up selling it for $1.25 a pop, which works out – given the outrageous cost of living in Ireland – at roughly three nappies per copy?
  The answer: None, unless you’re insane.
  Anyway, if you have a Kindle, go buy Allan Guthrie’s brilliant TWO-WAY SPLIT. Apparently he’s going to cut me in for 0.000015 cents per copy, as commission, and if he sells a million copies this week, my baby girl gets to eat.
  You know it makes sense.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: MOON by Duncan Jones

Next Monday is the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, making for a timely release date for Moon, a tasty little Phildickian tale of clones, paranoia, and futuristic fear and self-loathing. To wit:

You certainly can’t fault Duncan Jones’ ambition. Moon is only his second feature, and yet Jones has boldly gone where directors such as Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Soderberg and Trumbull have gone before. And as if that wasn’t enough pop-culture baggage to lug around, Jones – aka Zowie Bowie, and the director of the quirkiest sci-fi space oddity for some time – is David Bowie’s son.
  Under pressure? No man has more …
  Actually, Moon unfolds with the easy authority of a director in mid-career. Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a lone astronaut working on a mining station on the dark side of the moon with only a talking computer, Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), for company. Sam works for E-Lunar, a company strip-mining the moon of selenium, a miracle energy source which has recently reversed Earth’s chronic energy dependency. With his three-year contract running out in a matter of weeks, Sam is tired, bored and unkempt, but very much looking forward to going home to Earth to see his wife, Tess (Dominique McElligott), and young daughter, Eve.
  Unfortunately, while checking out a malfunctioning mining vehicle, Sam has a serious accident. The next we see of him, in the base’s infirmary, the previously scruffy miner is clean-shaven and immaculately dressed. Banned from moving outside the base by Gerty, Sam invents an excuse and goes to check the malfunctioning mining vehicle. Inside the vehicle he discovers his unkempt and unconscious but very much alive doppelganger. Is Sam hallucinating? Has he gone insane? Or has he simply – fiendishly – been cloned?
  It may sound perverse to say that a film that so explicitly references some of science-fiction’s most recognisable movies has a freshness and authenticity all of its own, but the movies Moon pays homage to – 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, Solaris, even Blade Runner – are also thoughtful, introspective pieces that trade on the question that has sustained 2,500 years of philosophy: What is it, exactly, that makes us truly human? As Sam and Sam declare an uneasy truce, despite each thinking he is the original and the other the clone, the screenwriters, Jones and Nathan Parker, use their dilemma to ask a series of profound questions about the nature of humanity, about personality and uniqueness, about the very tools we use to measure who we are.   As is generally the case with the best sci-fi – or speculative fictions, as its devotees prefer – Moon is a fable about contemporaneous alienation, and for the moon-bound Sam, the isolation is literal as well as psychological and emotional. How is he ever likely to extricate himself from his predicament, asks the story, when he has only his mirror-image to turn to for answers? How is it possible to find the strength to live when your life is not even pointless in the face of the heedless cosmos, but a carbon copy of a pointless existence?
  Despite the relatively small budget of £5 million, Jones has created a superb lunar landscape, an utterly believable hinterland that sets the tone for Sam’s isolation with its vast backdrop of the limitless universe. The special effects give proceedings an unexpectedly appropriate other-worldly feel, the exteriors drenched in matt blacks and greys, and gleaming silvers, conveying the sense that Sam has woken up to discover himself not only in a nightmare, but a ghost story too, albeit a haunting that is – as with Kubrick’s The Shining – derived less from the supernatural than the manifestation of a fatally sickening mind.
  It’s not a perfect movie, of course. There are craters in the plot, the largest concerning the fact that Sam ploughs a lone furrow as a lunar miner. If selenium is the miracle energy provider the movie claims it to be, wouldn’t a host of companies on Earth have laid claim to parts of the moon? And even if the E-Lunar company had a monopoly on the source of lunar selenium, it would surely have a small army of Sams at work on the dark side of the moon.
  Caveats aside, Moon is a thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking offering. Rockwell turns in an excellent performance, particularly as he’s playing against himself for practically the entire movie. He does get support from Spacey as the lugubrious robot Gerty, who in turn offers some flashes of black humour. Gerty, to all sci-fi fans, is the latest incarnation of Hal, the mission-wrecking computer from 2001. When Gerty helps rather than hinders Sam at a crucial point in the story, Sam is moved to ask why. “Because it’s my job to help you, Sam,” Gerty replies, deadpan, setting off a million dark and knowing chuckles.
  As for Duncan Jones, well, he’s got a black sense of humour too. Rather than have Sam rise each morning to the alarm-clock strains of the more appropriate Space Oddity, or Major Tom, Jones has him wake to (koff) Chesney Hawkes’ The One and Only. ****