Nobody Move, This Is a Review: THE IRON WILL OF SHOESHINE CATS by Hesh Kestin

And now for something almost entirely different. Set in New York in late 1963, THE IRON WILL OF SHOESHINE CATS is narrated by Russell Newhouse, a young Jewish student of English literature. At the age of 22, Russell is an orphan, having lost his mother at a young age, and his father - a well-known hard-bitten Jewish NYPD cop - more recently.
  Russell is also a member of the Bhotke Young Men’s Society, a meeting of which is interrupted by the arrival of Shushan Cats, a notorious gangster and larger-than-life character known to the media as ‘Shoeshine Cats’ and ‘Kid Yid’. The Bhotke Young Men’s Society owns a plot of real estate in the Queens cemetery, and Shushan, whose mother has just died, wishes to join the society so as to avail of a grave for his beloved mother. Russell, as secretary for the society, is given the job of organising the funeral.
  From there, of course, it’s but a short hop, skip and jump before Russell is running a mob empire and fending off FBI investigations into the assassination of JFK.
  First that mob empire: Shushan ‘Shoeshine’ Cats is not Italian, but Jewish, and this is crucially important to the plot and the way the story is told. Kestin frequently refers back to the Holocaust, for example, which has taken place barely two decades before in terms of the novel’s setting:

Of the entire village of Bhotke [in Poland], only one man had survived the initial slaughter in 1939 when an SS battalion had entered the village … Was it any wonder that a Jew who brandished a baseball bat and feared no one, and who was known to fear no one, might become a hero to the Jews who survived?
  To the members of the Bhotke Young Men’s Society, Shushan Cats was no criminal. The criminal statutes held no validity for those to whom the law meant only authorized starvation, torture, death. Everything done to the Jews of Europe … everything done to these had been absolutely legal, sanctioned by legitimate courts whose judges sat in black robes and vetted each and every decree as binding, fair, in the public interest, legal. Under these circumstances, that Shushan Cats was a Jewish gangster not only could not be held against him, but was a matter for celebration. (pg 219)

  The novel is on the one had a mildly absurd and very funny crime novel. Kestin revels in the tropes of the crime novel, and virtually every chapter ends on a cliff-hanger, each one more ridiculous than the last. There are times when the tough-guy patter and dialogue is so hard-boiled as to recall the best of Raymond Chandler, although Kestin does invest his style with directness that can be as disconcerting as it is hilarious: “I thought: Let’s take this bullshit one turd at a time.” (pg 127)
  For the most part, however, style and tone is very much tongue-in-cheek; while the historical detail is neatly detailed, and the story is very much rooted in reality, the central premise - that a bookish-loving student might find himself gifted a gangster’s criminal empire - is ludicrous.
  It’s important, I think, to view that unlikely promotion in context, however; the ludicrous nature of it is very deliberate. How likely would it have been fifty years previously, for example, that a single nation would make it its mission to wipe out the entire Jewish race? How likely was it, on November 20th, 1963, that President John Kennedy would be assassinated on a drive through Dallas, Texas? Could anyone have predicted, ten years previously, that hawks in Moscow and Washington would have lined up enough nuclear warheads to eradicate humanity rather than back down on a matter of principle?
  The early 1960s was a time when the absurd seemed to rule, Kestin reminds us, and the central thrust of his story, as Russell effortlessly replaces Shushan as a mobster, is no more or less absurd than any of history’s more famous lunacies.
  Russell, the first-person narrator, is an immensely likeable character. An honours student in English literature, he is smart, funny, very self-aware and self-deprecating - not only about himself, but his culture and heritage:

While a young and more affluent generation of native-born Jews felt as American as baseball, Frank Sinatra and Chinese food, the foreign-born, most of whom had escaped the Nazi ovens through sheer luck, considered themselves marginal. For their sons the line between newly American and American never existed … but for the so-called greenhorns American was not a noun but a verb: you had to work at it. Even the longtime recording secretary, whose Yiddish was not only perfect but perfectly legible, voted himself out of the job in a flurry of nativism that would have given pause to the Ku Klux Klan. (pg 2)

  This kind of bright, breezy tone, replete with off-colour humour and/or cultural insight, characterises the tone of the novel. Russell’s voice, and his way of seeing the world, which is simultaneously cynical and refreshing, becomes very quickly addictive. Not only is he opening up a world that is something of a novelty to us - even in 1963, the notion of Jewish mobsters was growing archaic - he is doing so in some style, not least because Russell is himself a student of English literature who at his happiest, linguistically speaking, when taking huge liberties with the language.
  It’s also true that, in terms of Russell’s development, Kestin has his cake and eats it too. On one level, Russell’s slightly surreal adventures in New York’s gangland are a spoof on young male fantasies of power, money and (especially) sex; by the same token, Kestin describes Russell’s new-found wealth and power with palpable glee. The result is a character with a real spring in his step, a young, Jewish Tony Soprano revelling in an Alice in Wonderland experience as he steps through the looking-glass and begins to appreciate the extent to which his new world has no limits - or at least, that the limits which apply to normal, law-abiding citizens simply don’t apply to Shushan Cats, Russell Newhouse and their ilk.
  Shushan Cats, meanwhile, is one of the most compelling literary creations of recent years. A self-made and self-educated man, Shushan is on the face of it a typical mobster, a hard man who rules with a fist of iron.
  Kestin gives Cats a number of unexpected dimensions, however. The first is his Jewish heritage, which Kestin links very strongly to the recent Holocaust and to Cats’ ability to survive and thrive in adverse circumstances. Cats is not a conservative or traditional Jew; indeed, this is why he first embraces Russell Newhouse, and brings him into the fold, as he needs the young man to properly organise his mother’s funeral. Nonetheless, Cats observes shiva in the traditional manner, and is appropriately respectful of his ancestors, family and otherwise.
  Another unexpected aspect is the depth and breadth of Cats’ education. An autodidact with a voracious appetite for books, Cats is happy to give the impression of being an ignorant, unlearned gangster, in part because his modus operandi depends on wrong-footing those who underestimate him. At one point, accused of coasting through his university education, and thus wasting it, Russell announces that he could quite easily write a term paper on HUCKLEBERRY FINN without applying himself too seriously to reading it:

  “You could write a paper now?” Shushan said. “On Huckleberry Finn?”
  “Sure.”
  “Could you write it on the seventeen fucking accents and dialects in it, or the place of theatre, or Nigger Jim’s options, or the resolution of sequence, like when …” Shushan stopped. “What’d I do? Russy, shut your mouth a fly will come in.”
  Finally I had to speak. “What is it with you, Shushan? Are you a gangster or what? Every time I look up there’s another literary reference fired off, another allusion … Del, an hour ago this guy was quoting La Rochefoucauld to a couple of gumshoes --”
  “The elder or the son?”
  “Père,” Shushan said. “To my mind, the son was nothing.”

  Of course, there is nothing that is even remotely realistic about Shushan Cats. A benign mobster who is inordinately generous, who is beloved and respected throughout the city, and by cops and criminals alike, he is a fantasy father-figure to the orphaned Russell, who craves not only fatherly affection, but direction in his life, a moral weather-vane to help him make sense of the topsy-turvy times in which he lives. That it’s a gangster who provides this sense of direction and self-worth is just one more of the many delicious ironies that underpin this novel.
  The tone, meanwhile, is a beautifully judged affair. Shushan Cats’ reference to the ‘seventeen fucking accents and dialects’ in Huckleberry Finn is no accident; SHOESHINE CATS is a symphony of accents and dialects that reflects the various immigrant groups’ origins, and reminds us of the extent to which New York was and is a melting pot. But Hesh Kestin isn’t satisfied with that: he strains a variety of accents and dialects through the filter of the classic hard-boiled novel, the dialogue whip-smart and crackling with Chandleresque humour.
  As the Huckleberry Finn reference above suggests, it’s also a novel chock-a-block with literary allusions that run the gamut from ALICE IN WONDERLAND to HEART OF DARKNESS. But Kestin isn’t a cultural snob; in Russell’s world, Dodgers’ pitcher Sandy Koufax is as relevant, and important, as Joseph Conrad or Mark Twain.
  For all of its absurdities and off-kilter sense of humour, however, the novel is very much rooted to its time and place by the event that looms in the background of the story from the very beginning, that of the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas. That event doesn’t fully escape the gravitational pull of the novel’s absurd tone - Shushan Cats is a long-time friend of Jack Ruby; at one point, Cats, a former crack marksman with the Marines, is considered a suspect for the assassination - but there is a pervasive sense that the killing of JFK, for all the man’s personal faults (to which Shushan testifies at every opportunity), marks something of a watershed in modern American history; that America took a turn for the worse on that fateful date in November 1963.
  Ultimately, and for all of his idiosyncrasies and fantastical attributes, Shushan Cats excels at realpolitik. Less than two decades after the Holocaust, and with the reader aware that the assassination of JFK is only a matter of days away, the world is the way it is; significantly less than idyllic, certainly, and yet you have no choice but to deal with it on its own terms:

  “So you’re some kind of benevolent despot,” I said, by now wondering if I did indeed have balls of stainless steel. “You think that’s American?”
  “Fuck that,” Shushan said. “You’re going to learn you can’t do everything the right way, because of all the people who are ready to do it the wrong way. You’re just a kid, your nose is in books, and maybe you know a lot, but what you don’t know is that in the real world somebody has to make a decision every minute. Okay, sometimes you get the wrong somebody, and sometimes he doesn’t have the luxury of being democratically elected, but somebody has to step up.” (pg 90)

  Everything a good novel should be and more, THE IRON WILL OF SHOESHINE CATS is by turns hilarious, brutal, irreverent, thought-provoking, vexing and terrific fun. - Declan Burke

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books: Tony Black’s MURDER MILE

We’ve noted on these pages before that Tony Black is an honorary Irishman, having spent his childhood summers in the vicinity of Galway. Not that a man’s honorary nationality should matter when it comes to giving away free books. For lo! Tony’s publishers at Arrow have very kindly provided us with three copies of Tony’s latest tome, MURDER MILE, for your delectation. But first, the blurb elves:

In a cold, windswept field on the outskirts of Edinburgh lies the brutally mutilated body of a young woman. As DI Rob Brennan looks at the tangled mass of limbs and blood, he feels his heart freeze. Like Fiona Gow five years earlier, this girl has been strangled with her own stockings, sexually mutilated and her eyes have been gouged out. Is this the work of an Edinburgh Ripper? The press certainly think so. Rob Brennan is determined to uncover the truth - however painful that might be. But truth is hard to come by in a world of police rivalries, media hysteria and copycat crime.

  Sounds like an absolute belter. To be in with a chance of winning a copy of MURDER MILE, just answer the following question:

What’s your favourite Edinburgh-based novel?

  Answers via the comment box, please, along with a contact email address (using (at) rather than @ to confound the spam monkeys), before noon on Friday, April 6th. Et bon chance, mes amis …

Cold Cold Comfort

I had an interview with Adrian McKinty (right) published in the Irish Examiner recently. It ran a lot like this:

Taboo or not taboo, that is the question. Adrian McKinty’s latest novel, THE COLD COLD GROUND, has for its backdrop one of the most contentious topics in recent Irish history, the IRA hunger strikes of 1981.
  “It is a taboo subject,” McKinty agrees. “In fact, the whole Troubles era is still a taboo. I had a conversation with a BBC NI producer once, we were discussing a potential commission. He was completely aghast when I told him that I wanted to do something about the Troubles. ‘That’s all behind us now, we want to look to the future,’ he said. Well, it isn’t behind me. I’ll never forget those days.
  “It’s also true,” he adds, “that if no one wants to talk about something, then that’s probably the very thing you should be talking about.”
  Born in 1968 in Carrickfergus, Co Antrim, McKinty grew up a child of the Troubles.
  “My memories of that time are so vivid that it was pretty easy coming up with material for the book,” he says. “For example, I used to get a lift to school from a neighbour who was a Major in the UDR. Every morning he would get down on his knees and check under his car for mercury-tilt bombs, and when he got the all-clear he would call my little brother, me and his son outside and we would get in the car and go to school. But then one day it was raining hard, and he decided just to skip it and called us out without checking under the car. Every week on the news you’d hear about a copper or a soldier, and sometimes their families, who were killed by a mercury-tilt device. So on that ride to school I literally thought I was going to die.”
  If you’re a writer, there are no such things as bad memories, only experiences to be retro-fitted for the sake of a story.
  “Of course,” he grins, “like the self-consuming novelist I am, I took the memory and put it in the book. But it was really an extraordinary time and the more I probed my own recollections, the more those gates opened. A lot of them were bad memories: the time I got knocked down by a police Land Rover in a hit-and-run, the fight I got into with a paramilitary hood and ended up with 18 stitches in my face, the time I planted a bullet in my sister’s handbag to see what would happen at a police checkpoint, our next door neighbour getting arrested for a triple homicide by seemingly half the British Army, bomb scares, bombs, riots … So, yeah, they sound like bad memories. But in many ways, they’re gold for a writer.”
  THE COLD COLD GROUND centres on Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy, who investigates a series of murders that appear to be the work of a killer taking advantage of the tensions created by the hunger strikes. As the name suggests, Sean Duffy is a Catholic. Why did McKinty, himself a Protestant, choose a Catholic RUC man for the hero of his book?
  “There were a couple of reasons,” he says. “I wanted Duffy to arrive in East Antrim as an outsider, and as an outsider he could cast a jaundiced eye on the toxic politics and culture of the area. And of course, I knew that as a Catholic Duffy would run right up against all the fault lines of the time, which would be tremendous material for a novelist. I grew up in a working class Protestant housing estate and I loved the idea of putting a cynical intellectual like Duffy in among those people. And as a Catholic copper, Duffy can never be completely comfortable in his own skin or in the company he keeps. His life is literally on the line every single day.
  “That he’s a Catholic in the RUC in 1981 would have been incredibly rare back then,” he says. “The IRA famously had a bounty on Catholic policemen and the RUC was completely distrusted by the Catholic community, so few joined. The force in that era would have been over 90% Protestant. So you’ve got a gifted but conflicted and fractured young man in a very hot-house environment.”
  McKinty has written six adult crime titles previous to THE COLD COLD GROUND (he also writes children’s fiction), but this is his first police procedural novel. Why the change in direction?
  “To be honest, I was never that enthused about the police procedural story,” he says, “but then I got to know Evan Hunter [Ed McBain] a little bit before he died, and I started reading his fantastic 87th precinct books and I gradually saw the possibilities of that type of book. What finally sold me was reading James Ellroy’s LA Quartet, which are fascinating takes on the procedural, and by then I knew that this was a genre I wanted to tackle.”
  THE COLD COLD GROUND blends the police procedural with a serial killer storyline, a rare development in the Irish crime novel, which has seen very few serial killer stories published despite the recent boom in Irish crime fiction.
  Is this because, officially at least, we have no record of a serial killer operating in Ireland?
  “I don’t know about the South,” says McKinty, “but in the North, serial killers just get absorbed into the paramilitaries. I knew several clearly deranged individuals who were high ranking paramilitaries. The Shankhill Butchers and Michael Stone are just a couple of examples of psychopaths who probably would have been ordinary, everyday serial killers had they grown up in a non-sectarian society.”
  McKinty currently lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and two daughters. Is it the case that he needed to travel to the other side of the planet before he could start writing about home?

  “I’m not sure I completely buy into this exilic notion that you have to leave a place to write about it,” says the author. “At the last stanza of TS Eliot’s Little Gidding, he says, “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Perhaps, but William Faulkner did a pretty good job writing about Oxford, Mississippi while living in Oxford, Mississippi his entire life.”
  McKinty’s novels have been very well received to date, particularly, and unusually, as audio books. The Dead Year (2007) won the ‘Audie’ for Best Thriller / Suspense Novel, while Audible.com chose last year’s offering Falling Glass as the Best Mystery / Thriller of 2011.
  “That’s all down to the narrator, I think,” says McKinty. “If you can get a good narrator, you’re in like Flynn. I’ve been fortunate with Gerard Doyle, who is incredibly popular and much sought after. I’m pretty sure if I’d done a Le Carré or a Douglas Adams and narrated the books myself, it would have been a complete disaster.”
  THE COLD COLD GROUND is being touted as the first of a proposed trilogy, and McKinty is looking forward to exploring Northern Ireland in the 1980s through DS Duffy’s eyes.
  “I’ve got so much material about that time and place and there are many more interesting places the character can go,” he says. “I’d love to get him in some kind of confrontation with the Thatcher government, for example, or get mixed up in the DeLorean disaster, or any number of things. And of course, musically, we’ll eventually have to get to his difficult ‘New Romantic’ years …”

  THE COLD COLD GROUND by Adrian McKinty is published by Serpent’s Tail.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

On Shooting Bertie Ahern With Bullets Of His Own Shite

It’s been hilarious here in Ireland for the past week or so, if endemic political corruption is the kind of thing that tickles your funny-bone. The results of the Mahon tribunal are in, and even though former taoiseach Bertie Ahern (right, with cheeky chappie Robert - check the fine print on Robert's t-shirt) denies any wrongdoing on his behalf, he has resigned from the Fianna Fail party he led in government for 14 years, this before they can kick him out next Friday. Resigning before you can be booted out being, of course, the only action that a wrongfully libelled innocent man can take.
  For my own part, I don’t believe Bertie Ahern is personally and solely responsible for the economic disaster that is Ireland today, but only because I’m grudgingly forced to provide the muppet with a fool’s pardon. But still - a qualified accountant who, despite rising through the political ranks to become the Lord Mayor of Dublin, the Minister for Finance and then Taoiseach for 14 years, somehow never managed to persuade himself that it might be a good idea to open a bank account? Not dodgy at all, that. Not in the slightest. Doesn’t AT ALL suggest a man who shouldn’t have been allowed fumble in the greasy till of Tessie Bear’s sweetshop in Toy Town, let alone get his grubby mitts on the levers of power of a modern democracy. Here's a CAP taster on Bertrand from all the way back in 2007 ...
  Anyhoo, and with apologies to those of the Three Regular Readers who have sensitive stomachs, I pretty much had my say about Bartholomew Ahern in ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. To wit:

There being no ‘Family Guy’ to be found on any of the 94 channels available, Cass and I watch a documentary recreation of the latest scandal from the Middle East, which is the assassination of a carload of suspected terrorists by an air-to-ground missile fired from an unmanned drone airplane. An operator, sitting deep in the bowels of a destroyer, controls the drone and launches the rocket.
  ‘That’s complete crap,’ Cassie says. ‘Everyone knows those fuckers are sitting in a bunker in Idaho.’
  Either way, this represents a remarkable feat of engineering. At least Bin Laden got the human touch. This latest requires the identification, targeting and assassination of a carload of human beings from a position hundreds and perhaps thousands of miles beyond the boundaries of the state in which the car motors along. This is trial, conviction and execution by remote control.
  This is Phil Dick on a bad hair day. This is George Orwell suffering from migraine. This is Stanislaw Lem with a boil on his anal rim. The holiday cruise of the future involves safaris conducted from offshore destroyers, targeting carloads of suspected Muslim terrorists.
  I like to imagine the operator as he sits deep in the bowels of the destroyer twiddling the buttons of his joy-pad. This is the logic of breeding a generation of couch-bound warriors. Some day presidential candidates will be required to clear all twenty levels of ‘Apocalypse Hence III’, in one sitting and without resorting to cheats, in order to establish their credentials.
  When the programme ends we flick over to the news, to see what Jean Byrne is almost wearing tonight while reading the weather report. A PR flunky for Bord Failte regales us with a good-vibes story about soaring tourist numbers in the wake of visits by Queen Elizabeth II and President Barack Obama.
  I say, ‘Hey, how about this. We stick all the scumbags on an island, say Inishbofin, all the paedophiles and bankers and Real IRA fuckers.’
  ‘Bertie Ahern,’ Cass murmurs, handing across the spliff.
  ‘Nice. So then we sell charter cruises to tourists, who sail around the island all day lobbing rockets at them. Plus, we don’t give them any food, so they’re eating one another. The scumbags, like, not the tourists.’
  ‘We could film it,’ Cass says, ‘sell the broadcast rights.’
  In the end we decide we want Bertie shot with bullets of his own shite, then left on a hospital trolley to rot.
  Sadly, Jean Byrne is a no-show for the weather report. Maybe she turned up naked tonight.

  So there you have it.

  It’s been pretty quiet recently, I have to say, in terms of AZC reviews. In one sense, that’s hardly surprising, seeing as how it was first published way back in August; but it was only officially published in February in the US and Canada, and there’s been precious little by way of reaction. Booklist and the Library Journal were very generous, as were Elizabeth A. White and Glenn Harper, but for the most part it’s been pretty much tumbleweeds.
  So it was nice to hear some good word for AZC this week. First up, the wonderful folk at Crimespree Magazine:

“You will be amused as hell, philosophically aroused and mentally sated as you wonder how Burke can pull it off. And pull it off he does. A courageous, droll and satisfying read.” - Crimespree Magazine

  And then, out of the blue, that very fine author Paul Johnston got in touch to say he’d read the book, and quite liked it:

“Do you know how difficult it is to write a postmodern crime novel that is both funny and moving? The only person I knew to have pulled that off was Robert Coover in his imaginatively titled NOIR. Now Declan Burke has done it even more successfully in ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. A true one-off: witty, profound, sad and ... cool as hell.” - Paul Johnston

  In the interest of clarity, transparency, accountability and non-Bertie Ahern-ish shenanigans, I should point out that (a) I write for Crimespree Magazine and (b) I reviewed Paul Johnston’s latest novel, THE SILVER STAIN, very positively last month - the review here is a longer version of an original that appeared in the Irish Times.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Brian Finnegan

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?
MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS by Agatha Christie. I graduated from Enid Blyton to Agatha Christie at the age of 13 and read her voraciously. ORIENT EXPRESS is her best, and even though it’s dated and the language is now unintentionally funny, it’s still as tightly wound and perfectly structured as a crime novel can be.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Ignatius J. Reilly from A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES - possibly the best literary creation of all time.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Marian Keyes. Seriously.

Most satisfying writing moment?
At the end of 1,000 words, which is my daily target.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
IN THE WOODS by Tana French. A brilliant investigation, a chilling backstory, a cracking crime team, beautiful prose and relentless tension.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
IN THE WOODS. I imagined it as a movie as I read it. It’s structurally perfect for screen adaptation.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is making myself get up at 6.30am every morning to write before I go to work (I find it impossible to write after a day at the office). The best thing, so far, has been getting my first book back from the printer, holding it and smelling it.

The pitch for your next book is …?
When a group of colleagues all lose their jobs in a Dublin-based global corporation, they resolve to stay in touch. The five meet once a month in the Forced Redundancy Film Club to watch their favourite classic movies in each other’s houses. Over the course of a year unlikely friendships form as each goes on a personal journey – reflected through the films chosen for their monthly meetings

Who are you reading right now?
PURE by Andrew Miller. Can’t put it down.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Too hard. Read, I think. Reading my own writing over and over again wouldn’t be enough for me.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Light, funny, pacy.

Brian Finnegan’s THE FORCED REDUNDANCY FILM CLUB is published by Hachette.

It’s My Birthday And I’ll Cry If I Want To

Or, having no good reason to cry at the moment, I’ll take the opportunity to side-step for one day the relentless shilling that generally characterises this blog and instead pause to smell the proverbial roses, and celebrate a number of things:

1. I’m 43. There was a time when I thought, and with good reason, that I wouldn’t make it to 30. So there’s that.
2. My baby girl, Lily (right, somehow wearing one more colour than God actually invented), will be four years old on Monday, and thus - as she points out on a regular basis - is no longer a baby girl, even though - as I point out on an equally regular basis - she’ll always be my baby girl. This time four years ago, I was hoping she’d be born today. It wasn’t to be, but I think we’ve all recovered from the disappointment at this stage.
3. Last Monday evening, Lily ‘read’ the Sleeping Beauty story to me, turning the pages and taking the pictures as her cue, and reciting aloud whatever she could remember of the story according to the images. I’m not the best of it yet.
4. I quit smoking (again) three weeks ago. So far, so good.

  There’s plenty of other stuff worth celebrating from the last year or so, but most of it is book-related, so it can all wait for another day.
  Today I will be mostly getting Lily out to school, then coming home to transcribe and write up a Richard Ford interview before reading the final 100 pages of the excellent THE IRON WILL OF SHOESHINE CATS by Hesh Kestin (the latter two items being my idea of work, by the way); proofing and subbing a couple of essays for a non-fiction collection on crime fiction that’s in the pipeline; and then, all going well, relaxing for the evening with what will probably be a very indulgent meal, a bedtime story for Lily, and a couple of beers in front of the TV with Mrs Lovely Wife.
  Not exactly rock ‘n’ roll, I know. But then, I am 43.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: LOST MEMORY OF SKIN by Russell Banks

Russell Banks’ 13th novel opens with a young man, a 22-year-old known simply as ‘the Kid’, entering a library and asking a librarian to enter his real name on an internet sex offenders list. When she does so, the Kid’s face pops up on the screen, which seems to satisfy some need the Kid has to be confirmed as a sex offender. This need to have his reality confirmed by other, external means is a recurring theme in the Kid’s story.
  The story then opens properly, informing us that as a convicted sex offender currently on parole, the Kid is not allowed to live within 2,500 feet of any place where young children are likely to congregate. This limits his options to three places in the city of Calusa (which appears to be Miami): a remote part of the airport; the swamp that backs onto the city; or under the Causeway that links the city of Calusa to a number of barrier islands along the coast.
  Throughout the novel, Banks draws parallels between the Kid and a number of classic outsider myths, particularly American mythology, such as Billy the Kid and the pirate William Kydde, and further draws explicit parallels between the Kid’s flight into the sanctuary of the Panzacola Swamp and that of the Seminole Indians, who fought the white settlers to a standstill and retained control of huge swathes of Florida’s mangrove swamps.
  Thus the Kid lives under the Causeway in a rudimentary commune with a number of other sex offenders, all male. These include Rabbit, Paco and the Greek, and a newcomer, formerly a lawyer, whom the group called Shyster. It’s a fragile society, and the reader is hardly surprised when the offenders’ haven under the Causeway is attacked in the middle of the night by a group of vigilante policemen, who roust the offenders out and banish them from their limbo-like existence, destroying their crude huts and tents, and shattering the facsimile of civilisation the men have built up over a number of years.
  Banks then introduces a second main character, the Professor. An unusually intelligent man, the Professor lectures at the local university on homelessness. He has always meant to converse with the homeless sex-offenders who live under the Causeway; when he hears the news that they have been rousted from their position, he goes to check it out. The Professor meets the Kid, and offers to help him financially if the Kid will agree to be interviewed about his particular predicament, and the factors that led him to become homeless. The Kid reluctantly agrees, and an odd relationship begins.
  Having chosen his subject matter, Russell Banks is in quite a bind at the beginning of this novel. He needs to make the Kid at least potentially sympathetic, or the reader will have little interest in reading on. And yet, expressing sympathy for a sex offender, and particularly one who targets children, is one of the last taboos of our culture.
  In order to combat this, Banks cites a number of examples of previously taboo topics and / or character types who were once outcasts in society, but have since been rehabilitated. The classic example is that of lepers, a group that is frequently mentioned in association with the Kid and his fellow sex offenders. In one example, Banks writes of the Kid reading the Bible in his tent:

The Kid has started reading the fifth chapter of Numbers and it gives him a sudden chill, makes him sit up in his sleeping bag and keep reading: And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Command the children of Israel, that they put out of the camp every leper, and every one that hath an issue, and whosoever is defiled by the dead: Both male and female shall ye put out, without the camp shall ye put them; that they defile not their camps, in the midst whereof I dwell …
  Not cool, the Kid thinks. Even lepers deserve a break and shouldn’t be abandoned and put under a bridge someplace outside the city like garbage just because they’re sick. That’s what hospitals are for … (pg 273)

  Are sex offenders our contemporary lepers, exiled from society for fear they might infect the rest of us with their disease? Are they entitled to hope that a cure might be found for their particular disease that might allow them to function in society at some point in the future?
  Earlier, Banks has written of the Professor’s intentions:

The Professor intends to cure the Kid of his paedophilia. Not with psychotherapy or drugs or more radical means like feeding him female hormones or chemical castration. He intends to cure the Kid by changing his social circumstances. By giving him power in the world. Autonomy. Putting his fate and thus his character in his own hands. He believes that one’s sexual identity is shaped by one’s self-perceived social identity, that paedophilia, rightly understood, is about not sex, but power. More precisely, it’s about one’s personal perception of one’s power. (pg 159)

  Taken in tandem, the Kid and the Professor make a convincing argument, within the context of the novel, for the fact that some sex offenders are very much the products of their culture. That is to say, they have received a rather negative, or non-existent, nurturing, and thus their sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, is nowhere as strongly pronounced as it should be. Or needs to be, if society is to function.
  The title of the novel, LOST MEMORY OF SKIN, is suggestive of the fact that an entire generation of men, especially, have grown up entirely desensitised to the reality of sex and physical touch, and are experiencing sex - the ultimate in emotional connection, in theory - at a remove, or second-hand, as it were.
  And if a generation’s reaction of one of its prime impulses has been so totally desensitised, what does that mean for the rest of its reactions towards society as a whole?
  There’s an interesting conversation between the Professor and his wife, Gloria, which begins on page 124 with Gloria warning her husband against getting too deeply involved with the Kid:

  You should be careful, hanging out with sex offenders [she says]. Especially homeless sex offenders. Don’t you find them … creepy? Scary? Some of them are rapists, I’ve heard. Child molesters.

  A page or so later, the Professor has this to say:

  These men are human beings, not chimpanzees or gorillas. They belong to the same species as we do. And we’re not hardwired to commit these acts. If, as it appears, the proportion of the male population who commit these acts has increased exponentially in recent years, and it’s not simply because of the criminalisation of the behaviour and a consequent increase in the reportage of these crimes, then there’s something in the wider culture itself that has changed in recent years, and these men are like the canary in the mine shaft, the first among us to respond to that change, as if their social and ethical immune systems, the controls over their behaviour, have been somehow damaged or compromised. And if we don’t identify the specific changes in our culture that are attacking our social and ethical immune systems, which we usually refer to as taboos, then before long we’ll all succumb. We’ll all become sex offenders, Gloria. Perhaps in a sense we already are. (pg 125, italics mine)

  Is Banks blaming the internet and the widespread dissemination of desensitising material? Or is the internet responding to a need in the culture, which seeks to be desensitised to its reality?
  Banks deserves credit for tackling a very difficult subject, and for doing so in a way that is not overbearing, dogmatic, nor prescriptive. Surprisingly, he can be comically playful with the issues he raises. I wouldn’t go so far as to describe the novel as a black comedy, but there are flashes of morbid wit throughout, which go a long way towards leavening the mood. One example comes close to the end, when the Kid is befriended by a freelance travel writer, called - almost inevitably - ‘the Writer’, who is penning a feature for a New York magazine (called ‘Outsider’) on the Panzacola Swamp. Once he hears about the Kid’s and the Professor’s story, the Kid asks if the Writer will write about the story:

Who’d want to read it? [responds the Writer]. Kiddie porn and child molesters, paedophiles and suicidal college professors? Jesus! Besides, I’m just a freelance travel writer, not some kind of investigative journalist or a novelist trying to depress people. I have to make a living. (pg 381)

  There are many other examples of a self-reflexive awareness. On a number of occasions, Banks has one of his characters remind another that what they’re dealing with is reality, rather than fantasy. For example, when the Kid interviews the Professor’s ‘confession’, and agrees to pass on the DVD to the Professor’s wife:

A deal is a deal [the Kid says]. It don’t actually matter to me what’s true about you and what isn’t. It ain’t like this is in a novel or a movie where the whole point is figuring out what’s true. (pg 300)

  Indeed, Banks is quite obviously playing post-modern games. When the Kid rents a houseboat to live on in the Panzacola Swamp, its name is the Dolores Driscoll - which is the same name of the bus driver who played a central part in the novel, THE SWEET HEREAFTER.
  All told, and even if it might have benefited from some judicious editing, I found LOST MEMORY OF SKIN to be a very satisfying novel, not least because Russell Banks is happy to raise any number of difficult questions and not feel the need to spoon-feed the reader easy questions, and for a finale that pulls the rug out from under the complacent reader.
  Both of the main characters, The Kid and The Professor, were sufficiently interesting in themselves and in tandem to make the narrative a compelling one, and The Kid’s story was something unique, offering a glimpse of a life on the underbelly of society that I had never come across before, while the Kid himself is a haunting creation, compared by the Professor to Huckleberry Finn, “long after he lit out for the Territory, grown older and as deep into the Territory as you can go.” - Declan Burke

Always Trust A Greek Bearing Gifts

Yep, it’s CRIME ALWAYS PAYS at Crime Always Pays - and before you ask, no, crime doesn’t pay. Or crime writing, at least, for me, doesn’t pay. But it is fun.
  Anyway, as all Three Regular Readers will be aware, I published CRIME ALWAYS PAYS - a comedy crime caper set in the Greek islands - as an ebook a couple of years ago, just when things went a little screwy around here, time-wise (new baby, writing a novel, day job, etc.). Which meant that I didn’t get any time to promote it, which was a shame, because I’m of the not-very-humble opinion that CAP is the best book I’ve written to date.
  I have a little more time on my hands these days (baby is all grown up, turning four next week, and currently learning to cook, clean, vacuum and take out the trash), so I’m rebooting CRIME ALWAYS PAYS with a brand spanking new cover, and planning to spend a bit more time promoting it.
  First, the blurb elves:

“You never get away. You’re always getting away ...”

When a kidnap scam goes south, Karen and Ray head for the Greek islands to lay low for a while. Trouble there is, Anna - their Siberian wolf - ripped off Rossi's ear, Rossi being Karen's ex who believes he's owed half the kidnap score. Then there's Doyle, the cop Ray was making gooey eyes at; Sleeps the narcoleptic getaway driver who wants to go back inside for some soft time; and Melody, who’s in the market for a decent story she can turn into a movie. All of which is just Chapter One ...

A trans-Europe screwball noir, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS features a cast of cops and robbers, losers and hopers, villains, saints and a homicidal Siberian wolf. You’ll never see the Greek islands in quite the same light again …

Praise for Declan Burke:

“Among the most memorable books of the year, of any genre, was Declan Burke’s ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL … Burke splices insights into the creative process into a fiendishly dark thriller that evokes the best of Flann O’Brien and Bret Easton Ellis.” - Sunday Times, ‘Best Books of the Year 2011’

“Imagine Donald Westlake and his alter ego Richard Stark moving to Ireland and collaborating on a screwball noir and you have some idea of Burke’s accomplishment with THE BIG O.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“I have seen the future of Irish crime fiction and its name is Declan Burke.” - Ken Bruen on EIGHTBALL BOOGIE

  In the interests of promoting said tome, by the way, I’m more than happy to email on a review copy (i.e., e-friendly copy) to anyone who thinks they might like to review it. Or, for that matter, to anyone who thinks they might like to read it with no strings attached. If you do, drop me a line at dbrodb[@]gmail.com. Hell, drop me a line anyway, just to say hello, let me know what you think of the new cover …
  CRIME ALWAYS PAYS did receive a couple of very nice reviews on its first pass around, by the way, the first from the inimitable Glenn Harper over at International Noir:

“CRIME ALWAYS PAYS is part road movie and part farce, reminding me sometimes of Elmore Leonard, sometimes of Allan Guthrie, sometimes of Donald Westlake and sometimes of the Coen Brothers - sometimes all at once.” - Glenn Harper, International Noir

  Meanwhile, the lovely folks at the New Mystery Reader declared that the novel was “ … a little like what might be expected if Elmore Leonard wrote from an outline by Carl Hiaasen ... It’s as close to watching an action movie as a reading experience can be.” Which is nice …
  Finally, here’s a little taster, aka how the novel kicks off, with the less-than-intrepid duo Rossi and Sleeps taking a visit to a veterinarian:

Sleeps

It was bad enough Rossi raving how genius isn’t supposed to be perfect, it’s not that kind of gig, but then the vet started carping about Sleeps’ pride and joy, the .22, nickel-plated, pearl grip, enough to stop a man and put him down but not your actual lethal unless you were unlucky. And right now, empty.
  Sleeps waggled it in the vet’s general direction. ‘Less talk,’ he said, ‘more angel of mercy. How’s that ear coming?’
  Not good and not fast, Rossi ducking around like Sugar Ray in a bouncy castle. Still in shock, bofto on the wowee pills, with these delusions of grandeur – he was Tony Montana or maybe Tony Manero, Sleeps couldn’t say for sure.
  It didn’t help there was no actual ear. The wolf had tore it clean off, along with enough skin to top a sizeable tom-tom. Plus the vet was using catgut and what looked to Sleeps like a needle he’d last seen on the Discovery Channel stuck horizontal through a cannibal’s nose.
  In the end Sleeps stepped in and stuck his forefinger in the wound, stirred it around. Rossi screeched once, high-pitched, then keeled over.
  ‘I’ll be wanting,’ Sleeps said, wiping his finger on Rossi’s pants, ‘a bag of horse tranks. And whatever gun you use for putting down the animals.’
  The vet shook his head. ‘We don’t use those anymore, they’re not humane.’
  ‘Humane? You’re a vet, man.’
  ‘We treat them like children,’ the vet said, ‘not animals.’
  ‘Nice theory.’ Sleeps scratched the cattle-prod off his mental list, gestured at Rossi with the .22. ‘But what if they’re a little of both?’

  So there you have it. CRIME ALWAYS PAYS. In comedy crime capers, at least. If you have the time, the energy and the inclination, I’d be very much obliged if you’d spread the good word …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Anna Smith

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?
I don’t have one particular crime novel I wish I’d written, because I enjoy a variety of crime – particularly American crime. But anything by Harlan Coben, as I like the way his character Myron Bolitar gets involved in all sorts of scrapes, plus the kind of attitude the character has. I like that style. And I also like anything by Tom Clancy, and the late, great James Crumley.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Impossible to answer that because there are so many brilliant female fictional characters down the years. But the ones who spring to mind as having left a lasting impression are, Sophie Zawistowski, the Polish prisoner in the Nazi concentration camp in SOPHIE’S CHOICE, by William Styron. Incredible character, and when I read that novel for the first time the Sophie character blew me away. Also, the bold Scarlett O’Hara from GONE WITH THE WIND – one of the first women to kick down all the barriers and still be the most amazing woman. And JANE EYRE – all the strength and vulnerability that Charlotte Bronte put into creating that character always makes me feel unworthy, no matter how many times I read the novel or listen to the audio version in the car!

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Any kind of pulp fiction. I would read Jilly Cooper or Jackie Collins – anything that’s a bit of escapism and takes me into a world that’s well outside of mine. Or something that would be make me laugh!

Most satisfying writing moment?
For me, the most satisfying writing moment is while I’m revising my script and I read back a chapter I’ve written, and find myself surprised at how it’s ended. That means when I wrote it I was so absorbed in the characters that it almost wrote itself, and I feel like I’m reading it for the first time. Spooky feeling, but I love it.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I haven’t read a lot of Irish crime, but I’m enjoying Stuart Neville’s latest novel STOLEN SOULS. I like his style – very pacy and kind of in-your-face. He can paint a character very quickly in few short sentences.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I think Stuart Neville’s novels with the Lennon detective character would make a great movie.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Best thing about being a writer is freedom to express yourself once you’ve got a character up and running and finding that it’s caught fire with the reader. And when you’re writing a novel, you sit down and look at the blank page of the next chapter and it feels as though these characters you’ve created are waiting to see what they’re going to do next. My characters are very real to me and I love living with them! I don’t have a worst thing about being a writer. I love everything about it, because creating characters and storylines is what makes me tick. I’d have nowhere to go in my life if I didn’t write. Sad, but true!

The pitch for your next book is …?
My next book is called REFUGE and is about refugees in Glasgow who are going missing under very mysterious circumstances, and the journalist character Rosie Gilmour is getting stuck into the investigation. I’m using my experience as a frontline reporter in troublespots all over the world to make the story feel real, and to help create characters with big backstories, who find themselves in Glasgow during a time when the city seems to have refugee fatigue. A lot of the novel is set in Glasgow as I like to retain that with all my novels as it’s my stomping ground. But it’s important to me to take Rosie out of the city and give her big stories all over the world, which is what I did. This investigation takes her to Bosnia, Belgrade and Kosovo, and it’s a ripping story that moves at such an incredible pace it was even hard for me to keep up with it!

Who are you reading right now?
Right now I’m reading a book by Natasha Cooper, called OUT OF THE DARK – very classy and a gripping story.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
If God appeared and says I can only write or read – it would be write. Every time. Writing is about more than putting words on the screen. I write in my head all the time, because I live in my imagination, and so much of what I see I always look further at it, creating characters and stories all the time. If I couldn’t write, I couldn’t think. I’m very lucky.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Compelling. Moving. Tense.

Anna Smith’s TO TELL THE TRUTH is published by Quercus.

The At Last Girl

Jane Casey (right) is quietly becoming one of the stars of the Irish crime writing scene, penning London-set psychological thrillers - THE MISSING, THE BURNING, THE RECKONING - which feature the very likeable heroine DC Maeve Kerrigan. Her latest offering is another Maeve Kerrigan novel, THE LAST GIRL (Ebury Press / May 24th), and the blurb elves have been wittering thusly:

High summer. Wimbledon. 14-year-old Lydia Kennford returns home to discover the bodies of her mother and twin sister in the family living room, while her father, Philip, lies unconscious and bleeding in an upstairs bedroom. DC Maeve Kerrigan and DI Josh Derwent begin to investigate, discounting a burglary quickly and focusing instead on Philip Kennford QC himself. There is no easy explanation for why he survived when the others were shown no mercy, and they suspect he might have staged the attack on himself after killing his wife and daughter. But Kennford is a self-possessed, intelligent man who knows criminal law inside out; proving that he’s guilty will be difficult.

  Jane Casey has twice been shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards in the last couple of years, and gone home empty-handed each time. Will THE LAST GIRL become THE AT LAST GIRL, ands see her finally taking home the gong? Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell …

A Short List of Irish Crime Writers on Twitter

Being a public service broadcasting-type post, in which - much as the headline suggests - we list the Irish crime writers on Twitter, in no particular order. To (t)wit:

Declan Burke @declanburke
Niamh O’Connor @Crimethrillers
Adrian McKinty @unitedirishman
Gerard Brennan @gerardbrennan
Claire McGowan @inkstainsclaire
Louise Philips @LouiseMPhillips
John Connolly @jconnollybooks
Stuart Neville @stuartneville
Colin Bateman @ColinBateman
Conor Fitzgerald @ConorFitzgerld
Conor Brady @ConorPMBrady
William Ryan @WilliamRyan_
Casey Hill @caseyhillbooks
Alan Glynn @alanglynnbooks
Eoin Colfer @eoincolfer
Jane Casey @JaneCaseyAuthor
Bob Burke @HarryPigg
John J Gaynard @JohnJGaynar
Arlene Hunt @arlenehunt
Rob Kitchin @RobKitchin
Susan Condon @SusanCondon
Laurence O'Bryan @LPOBryan

  So there you have it. If I’ve left anyone out, please let me know and I’ll add them in …

When In Rome, Change Your Name

An Editor Writes: Conor Fitzgerald’s THE NAMESAKE arrived in the post yesterday, which got me all fired up to write a post about it - and then I realised I already had, last November. Bummer. Oh well, I guess I can take the day off now, and go lounge in my gold-plated hammock with the diamond-encrusted hookah …

It’s only November, but already 2012 is shaping up to be yet another very fine year in Irish crime writing. I’ve already noted that Adrian McKinty’s latest, THE COLD COLD GROUND will be published in January, with Brian O’Connor’s MENACES to follow in February.
  One novel I’m particularly looking forward to is Conor Fitzgerald’s third offering, THE NAMESAKE, which is due in March. Quoth the blurb elves:

When magistrate Matteo Arconti’s namesake, an insurance man from Milan, is found dead outside the court buildings in Piazzo Clodio, it’s a clear warning to the authorities in Rome - a message of defiance and intimidation. Commissioner Alec Blume, interpreting the reference to his other ongoing case - a frustrating one in which he’s so far been unable to pin murder on a mafia boss operating at an untouchable distance in Germany - knows he’s too close to it. Handing control of the investigation to now live-in and not-so-secret partner Caterina Mattiola, Blume takes a back seat. And while Caterina embarks on questioning the Milanese widow, Blume has had an underhand idea of his own to lure the arrogant mafioso out of his hiding place ...

  I’ve been a fan of Conor Fitzgerald since his first outing, THE DOGS OF ROME, and I thought that the follow-up, THE FATAL TOUCH, was sufficiently good to propel him to the first rank of crime writing, Irish or otherwise - if memory serves, I was moved to compare that novel with John Banville’s THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE. If THE NAMESAKE represents a similar improvement on THE FATAL TOUCH, then God help us all …
  Incidentally, it’s interesting that Fitzgerald, who writes under a pseudonym, and is the son of noted Irish poet Seamus Deane, is here playing with notions of identity, and the truth (or otherwise) of names. Post-modern meta-fiction flummery, or simple coincidence? You - yes, YOU! - decide …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE SILVER STAIN by Paul Johnston

Crete is the setting for Paul Johnston’s 13th novel, THE SILVER STAIN, which sees Johnston’s Athens-based private eye Alex Mavros commissioned by a film producer, Luke Jannet, to find the personal assistant to the American movie star Cara Parks. A straightforward assignment, but Mavros quickly discovers that the events being depicted on the film set - the Nazi invasion of Crete in 1941 - have contemporary resonances that prove lethal.
  Two veterans of the 1941 invasion remain at loggerheads. Rudi Kersten was a German paratrooper who parachuted into Crete in during the invasion, and played his part - albeit reluctantly at times - in the subjugation of the islanders. The fact that the German occupation of Crete was marked by a number of atrocities means that feelings still run high over the events of 1941, and a shadow hangs over Kersten’s involvement in one of those atrocities, despite the fact that his guilt ensured that he returned to Crete long after the war and established the Heavenly Blue Resort, a luxurious hotel on the north coast that has provided investment and employment for Cretans for over 40 years.
  Few of Kersten’s Cretan contemporaries hold the German invasion against him personally, but the fact that the island is witnessing something of a neo-Nazi revival enrages his polar opposite, an ex-British Army officer who served during the defence of Crete, and who believes that Kersten has secrets to hide.
  This historical aspect to the novel is bound up in Mavros’s contemporary investigation when all roads lead to a remote village in the White Mountains, currently renowned as a haven for the drug-growing and smuggling extended family which lives there, but once something of a centre of Cretan resistance, when the andartes, or partisans, were prowling the mountains and sabotaging the German war machine.
  A Scottish author living in Greece, writing about a detective who is half-Scottish, half-Greek, Johnston employs an observer who is ideally placed to make an outsider’s caustic observations about modern Crete, yet knows the terrain well enough to give the setting a vividly authentic feel. In fact, the setting is one of this novel’s most attractive elements: despite being at the heart of European civilisation for the best part of four thousand years, Cretans retain something of a love-hate relationship with the notion of law-and-order, and especially any notion of laws laid down from beyond the shores of Crete.
  It’s worth pointing out that this novel is actually set in 2003, so that it doesn’t provide any real glimpse into the current economic woes and trauma besetting Greece. By the same token, there’s plenty here to suggest that the roots of Greece’s current predicament have very long roots, particularly when it comes to the locals’ laissez-faire attitude towards the rule of law.
  THE SILVER STAIN is a very enjoyable private eye novel in the classic mould, a lovely blend of pacy narrative, deadpan black humour and fascinating historical backdrop. - Declan Burke

There Will Be Bloodstock

It’s Cheltenham week, of course, so who else - rhetorical question alert - would we be talking about today other than Ireland’s finest exponent of the horse-racing thriller, Brian O’Connor. Brian’s debut novel, BLOODLINE, was a very fine thriller set in the world of Irish sport of kings, a setting O’Connor has stuck with for his follow-up offering. THREATEN TO WIN (Poolbeg) was published last month, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

Lorcan Donovan is an ex-amateur rider in charge of the bloodstock empire of the billionaire American, Jake Weinberger. But behind the glamour of big-money horse deals and the world’s great races, all is not as it seems. Jockey Mike Clancy is in the pocket of a ruthless Irish gangster and is stopping Weinberger’s great Derby hope from winning. With millions gambled on the result, Donovan becomes a pawn in a vicious game of blackmail, kidnapping and corruption. The race to the finish line becomes a simple race to survive and the only one he can trust is himself.

  Brian O’Connor, incidentally, is a racing correspondent with the Irish Times, so it’s fair to say that he knows of what he speaks. Mind you, if he was that clued-in, he’d be rich as Croesus from betting on the nags, and wouldn’t need to write about them. Wouldn’t he?

A Murder Less Ordinary

I had a review of Conor Brady’s A JUNE OF ORDINARY MURDERS published in the Irish Times yesterday, which could well have been a delicate commission, given that Conor Brady is a former editor of said Irish Times. I enjoyed the book tremendously, though, not least for its historical detail and setting, and for its complex protagonist, Detective Sergeant Joe Swallow, who reminded me very much of Kevin McCarthy’s RIC Sergeant O’Keefe in PEELER (2010).
  There have been some very interesting historical crime novels set in Ireland recently: Kevin McCarthy’s PEELER, as noted; Eoin McNamee’s novels from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s; Benjamin Black’s novels, set in 1950s Dublin; Cora Harrison’s fifteenth century books set in Clare’s Burren country; Adrian McKinty’s THE COLD COLD GROUND, which is set during the hunger strikes of 1981.
  It’s a relatively small number of titles, but it makes for an interesting trend, and A JUNE OF ORDINARY MURDERS is a fine addition to the ranks. To wit:

DUBLIN SWELTERS IN the notorious heatwave of June 1887 as Conor Brady’s debut novel opens. The authorities at Dublin Castle are more concerned with the city’s simmering political tensions. With Prince Albert Victor due in Dublin to celebrate Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee against a backdrop of violent Land League agitation, the castle is concerned that any one of a number of subversive organisations might attempt an assassination.
  So when Det Sgt Joseph Swallow of Dublin Metropolitan Police’s G division is sent to the Chapelizod Gate in Phoenix Park to investigate the discovery of the badly mutilated bodies of a man and a young boy, the authorities are initially relieved that the murders are “ordinary” rather than politically motivated.
  In all the best crime fiction, however, a juicy murder tends to minimise the distance between the criminal fraternity and the higher echelons of society, and such is the case in A June of Ordinary Murders . The death of career criminal Cecelia “Pisspot Ces” Downes makes matters trickier for Swallow, as her grasping lieutenants jockey to fill the power vacuum left in her wake, and the subsequent discovery of a young woman’s body in the Grand Canal complicates things even more.
  Brady weaves a police procedural that does full justice to the complex nature of the social, political and criminal labyrinth that was Dublin in the summer of 1887. He paints a vivid picture of the city as it bakes beneath the unrelenting sun, employing Joe Swallow’s sharp eye and the character’s ambitions as an amateur painter to deftly sketch both its landmarks and its less salubrious corners.
  The novel is set at the dawn of what we would now consider to be the age of forensic science, and we find Swallow dabbling in such radical innovations as ballistics and reconstructive portraiture. There’s also the occasional nugget of historical delight to be gleaned, such as the archaic notion of a “dying declaration”, a legal concept that held a man’s final words to be sound as evidence in court, on the basis that no dying man would knowingly lie.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Down These Teen Streets

You’d have to feel sorry for the Belfast Tourist Board. Just when things are starting to look up for the city, along comes the likes of Colin Bateman, Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville with their gritty ‘n’ grimy crime novels to lower the tone all over again. Not helping matters in the slightest is one Gerard Brennan, who has made the leap from dedicated blogger to fully fledged author with his debut novel, WEE ROCKETS, which concerns itself with teenage tearaway Joe Philips and his criminal tendencies. Herewith be a sample:

Chapter 1

The streets of Beechmount stank of wet dog. The effect of drying rain in early summer. Light faded from the West Belfast housing area. Joe Philips yawned and slumped against the redbrick alley wall. Half past ten at night. He wanted to be in bed, cosy and watching a DVD until he drifted off to sleep. But he was the leader. The rest of the gang expected him to be there.
  At least it was holiday time. No school to mitch in the morning. He popped his head around the corner and glanced down the avenue.
  “I see one,” he said.
  They all looked up to him. Literally. In the last few weeks he’d taken what his ma called a growth spurt. He’d use his share of tonight’s money to buy longer trousers. Too much white sock showed between his Nike Air trainers and his Adidas tracksuit bottoms.
  “Anyone else about?” Wee Danny Gibson asked. He snubbed a half-smoked fag on the alley wall and tucked the butt behind his ear.
  “No, just the aul doll. Easy enough number.”
  Wee Danny nodded and the rest of the gang twitched, murmured and pulled hoods up over lowered baseball caps. Ten of them in all, not one above fourteen years old.
  “Right, let’s go,” Joe said.
  They spilled out of the alley and surrounded the blue-rinse bitch like a cursing tornado. She screamed, but they moved too fast for the curtain-twitchers to react. Broken nose bleeding, she dropped her handbag and tried to fend off kicks and punches. Wee Danny scooped it up and whistled. They split in ten different directions. The old granny shrieked at them. They were gone before any fucker so much as opened his door …

  For a longer excerpt, clickety-click here …
  Incidentally, Gerard Brennan’s novella THE POINT won the prestigious Spinetingler award for Best Novella of 2011. For more, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Dana King

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?
Probably either THE MALTESE FALCON [by Dashiell Hammett] or THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE [by George V. Higgins]. Everything written after each of them had to deal with the comparisons, and each of them changed some aspect of crime fiction writing forever.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
My right brain says Chili Palmer in GET SHORTY [by Elmore Leonard]. No one is cooler, or had more fun making lemonade from lemons than Chili. My left brain says Steve Carella of the 87th Precinct novels, for being the guy everyone depended on to be stable and reliable.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I hope this doesn’t sound condescending, but Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels. They’re more like contemporary thrillers than the sometimes ambiguous, gritty things I usually read, but Child’s clarity and simplicity of approach are refreshing every so often. They’re modern day American Westerns with an invincible hero, and great fun to read because so much of each book keeps you wondering how Reacher is going kick this guy’s ass. Not if; how. Child doesn’t get enough credit for what a good writer he is. He always stays out of the way as the author, lets the story play out through Reacher’s thoughts and actions.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Getting the release and check from Todd Robinson of the late, sorely missed, Thuglit, when he selected a short story of mine for one of his ‘Blood, Guts, and Whiskey’ collections.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Of those I’ve read, I’d vote for Declan Hughes’s ALL THE DEAD VOICES. All of the Ed Loy books are good, but the way this book uses background from The Troubles is wrenching, and also informative for someone who grew up far away from them. John Connolly’s THE BLACK ANGEL also struck a chord with me, but I don’t know that I consider Connolly to be crime fiction so much as paranormal / PI / I sure hope none of this is true.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Depends on where the movie is made. For an American film, Adrian McKinty’s THE DEAD YARD would work well, especially if someone like the Coen brothers made it. In the movie were made on your side of the sheugh (thanks to Adrian McKinty for teaching me that term), I’d vote for Declan Hughes’s THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD. Americans don’t seem to want to make movies anymore with the kind of subtlety it needs. Same thing with THE BIG O. We’d make it a farce because it’s funny, but it’s not a farce. The humour has to be treated just so. I thought Ken Bruen’s LONDON BOULEVARD would be a great movie as I was reading it, but that movie has been made, so it’s off the list. I’ve yet to see it, so I can’t say whether a great movie was made. If it wasn’t, it should have been. Everything is there.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst is about halfway through the first draft, when I’m convinced whatever I’m working on is a piece of shit and I might want to start over. The ability to read other writers’ blogs and interviews on the Internet has taught me I am not alone here. That helps a lot. The best was when several writers I regard as my betters went out of their way to compliment and promote WILD BILL. It was rewarding beyond any expectations and made all the work and waiting worthwhile. I hope to be able to repeat that with WORST ENEMIES and going forward. Thanks for giving me a leg up with getting the word out.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Small town cops aren’t in as far over their heads as some people think, but knowing who did something and proving it are two different things.

Who are you reading right now?
I finished John Connolly’s THE WHISPERERS late last night. Adrian McKinty’s FALLING GLASS is next. (No, I didn’t set those up to look good on CAP. I really was reading THE WHISPERERS when you asked about the interview, and FALLING GLASS arrived in the mail a day or so before.)

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Read. My writing would soon bore me if I had no one else to recharge my batteries. I never tire of reading.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Tight. Realistic. Sardonic.

Dana King’s WORST ENEMIES is a Penns River Novel.

Banks For The Memories

I don’t profess to know how prizes and awards are decided, or what the machinations are, but you certainly couldn’t accuse the folks behind the Orange Prize of not being up to speed. For lo! Aifric Campbell’s third offering, a timely novel set in the world of investment banking titled ON THE FLOOR (Serpent’s Tail), was officially published on March 1st, and here it is, on March 8th, already long-listed for the Orange Prize. Impressive, no?
  Anyway, Aifric is interviewed over in the Telegraph today, on International Women’s Day (hi, Mum!), speaking about what it’s like to be a woman operating in a male-dominated world. Quoth Aifric:

“I was always interested in writing about the City because it’s a closed world. But it took a long time because it’s difficult to make that world explainable to people outside it,” she said.
  “And I specifically wanted to write about women at work because I don’t think we read enough about that in fiction. If a woman is in a male-dominated world, what does she discover about herself?”

  Funnily enough, I was just thinking yesterday about the possibilities of a novel about an express parcel delivery dispatcher who takes a high-powered rifle and goes postal because she’s a woman in a mail-dominated world. Any takers?

Scandinavian Crime Fiction: Whither The Mavericks?

I’m reading Barry Forshaw’s DEATH IN A COLD CLIMATE at the moment, and a fine piece of work it is too, being a forensically detailed account of the rise and rise of Scandinavian crime fiction. One interesting aspect is the short interviews dotted throughout the text with British-based editors who have signed Scandinavian authors, who respond to Forshaw’s question of whether the current trend for Scandinavian crime fiction is running out of steam with variations on a standard response of, ‘Well, all good things must end, but my guy / gal is different to the rest because …’ Yes. But you would say that, wouldn’t you?
  The book has got me thinking about the future of Irish crime fiction, though - or rather, about the fact that ‘Irish crime fiction’ doesn’t really have a future. A couple of weeks ago I posted a comment on a website which was asking about which country was likely to break through as the ‘next Scandi crime’ phenomenon, suggesting that it had to be Ireland. Now I’m not so sure; in fact, I’m pretty certain it won’t happen.
  That’s not to say that Irish writers aren’t on a par with their peers all over the world; they are, and then some. I honestly believe that some of the Irish crime writers currently plying their trade are some of the finest writers working in the genre.
  The problem, in terms of the break-out to mass commercial success, is also one of Irish crime writing’s greatest strengths: its diversity.
  Over the last year or so I’ve read novels by Karin Fossum, Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo, Camilla Lackberg, Roslund & Hellström, Liza Marklund, Jan Costin Wagner, Yrsa Sigurdardottir and Anne Holt. Some were better than others; some were very good indeed.
  What struck me most forcibly, however, is how narrow are the parameters of Scandinavian crime fiction. That’s not to say that all the writers are working off the one palette - Karin Fossum’s novels are very different to Liza Marklund’s, for example, and there’s a marked difference in the urban- and rural-based police procedurals written by Jo Nesbo and Camilla Lackberg, respectively.
  Essentially, though, the Scandinavian novels I’ve read have been for the greater part characterised by the classic crime fiction model: a state-sanctioned investigator (cop, private eye, lawyer, etc.) charting the symptoms of turbulence in society and persuading us that the (admittedly tarnished) status quo is better than the alternative.
  There’s nothing wrong with that story-telling model, of course. I’m a fan of many writers who employ it. But it does seem to me, from my limited reading of Scandinavian crime writing, that there’s a homogeneity to the ‘brand’.
  I find that odd. It’s not as if the current crop of Scandinavian crime writers only began writing last year, or the year before. Hakan Nesser published his first novel in 1988; Henning Mankell’s first Wallander novel appeared in 1991; Karin Fossum’s first Inspector Sejer novel arrived in 1995; Anne Holt’s first novel came in 1993. Which is to say that the earliest pioneers have been working in the field for the best part of two decades. Shouldn’t a few mavericks have appeared at this stage, writers keen to subvert the established form by playing with narrative structure, or humour? Are there any Scandinavians working in the historical crime fiction realms that predate WWII, say? Is it the case that there are Scandinavian writers who take a decidedly post-modern take on the crime narrative, in the way Ken Bruen or Colin Bateman does, or in the way that John Connolly blends genres, but simply aren’t translated into English?
  Where are the Scandinavian comedy crime capers? The classical noirs that take the part of the wretched and doomed criminal as he seeks in vain for an escape from the labyrinth?
  If they’re out there, and I’m simply not aware of them, please do let me know.

  In the meantime, the whole reason I started writing this post was to celebrate the fact that Eoin Colfer’s postmodern comedy crime caper about a wretchedly balding bouncer, PLUGGED, has been shortlisted for the LA Times Book Prizes in the ‘Mystery / Thriller’ category. The full shortlist runs as follows:

STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG by Kate Atkinson
PLUGGED by Eoin Colfer
11 / 22 / 63 by Stephen King
SNOWDROPS: A NOVEL by AD Miller
THE END OF THE WASP SEASON by Denise Mina

  Nice one, Mr Colfer sir. The prizes will be awarded on April 20th, by the way, and here’s hoping that Eoin will emulate Stuart Neville, whose THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST) won said category back in 2009.

Beware The Ides Of, Erm, June

It’s off to the Mansion House on Dublin’s Dawson Street tomorrow evening, Monday, March 5th, where Conor Brady will be launching his debut novel, A JUNE OF ORDINARY MURDERS, at 6.30pm. All are invited, of course, unless you’re total bloody riff-raff - it is the Mansion House, after all.
  Anyway, herewith be the blurb elves:

In the 1880s the Dublin Metropolitan Police classified crime in two distinct classes. Political crimes were ‘special’, whereas theft, robbery and even murder, no matter how terrible, were ‘ordinary’.
  Dublin, June 1887: the mutilated bodies of a man and a child are discovered in Phoenix Park and Detective Sergeant Joe Swallow steps up to investigate. Cynical and tired, Swallow is a man living on past successes in need of a win.
  In the background, the city is sweltering in a long summer heatwave, a potential gangland war is simmering as the chief lieutenants of a dying crime boss size each other up and the castle administration want the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee to pass off without complication. Underneath it all, the growing threat of anti-British radicals is never far away. With the Land War at its height, the priority is to contain ‘special’ crime. But these murders appear to be ‘ordinary’ and thus of lesser priority. When the evidence suggests high-level involvement, and as the body count increases, Swallow must navigate the waters of foolish superiors, political directives and frayed tempers to investigate the crime, find the true murderer and deliver justice.
  A JUNE OF ORDINARY MURDERS captures the life and essence of Dublin in the 1880s and draws the reader on a thrilling journey of murder and intrigue.

  I read A JUNE OF ORDINARY MURDERS last week, and although I can’t say too much about it for the moment, given that I was reading it for the purpose of review, I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed it, not least for its depiction of Dublin in 1887, and the political and social undercurrents of that time.
  Meanwhile, New Island have been kind enough to offer me three copies of A JUNE OF ORDINARY MURDERS to give away through Crime Always Pays. To be in with a chance of winning a copy, just answer the following question:

New Island will later this year republish one of Irish crime fiction’s prototype classics (it’s all very hush-hush for now). What out-of-print crime fiction title (bonus marks for Irish titles) would you like to see back on the shelves?

  Answers via the comment box, please, leaving a contact email address (using (at) rather than @ to confound the spam-urchins), by noon on Monday, March 12th. Et bon chance, mes amis …