Interview: Michael Connelly

I had an interview with Michael Connelly (right) published in the Irish Examiner last week. It ran a lot like this:

Early on in the new Michael Connelly novel, ‘The Gods of Guilt’, defence lawyer Mickey Haller – aka the Lincoln Lawyer – emerges from the courthouse, rushes down the steps and sits into the back of his Lincoln town car, only to discover it’s the wrong Lincoln.
  “What happened after the movie [The Lincoln Lawyer] came out,” says Michael Connelly, “was I started hearing from people who were saying, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the way I operate as a lawyer as well.’ So there’s a lot of copy-catting and so forth going on, and I really enjoyed breaking that fourth wall and mentioning that there’s a film out there in which Mickey Haller is portrayed by Matthew McConaughey. And I thought it’d be a fun thing to do, that Mickey comes out of the courthouse and doesn’t know which Lincoln town car is his.”
  Connelly, in Ireland to headline the recent Irish Crime Fiction Festival at Trinity College, was ‘very happy’ with The Lincoln Lawyer movie, although its success has proved something of a double-edged sword.
  “The movie version changed my profile,” he says, “and I ended up selling a lot of books, and the movie probably made the Lincoln Lawyer series more popular than the Harry Bosch series. That was strange for me, because I’m all about Harry Bosch, and doing The Lincoln Lawyer book in the first place was designed to allow me a break from Harry, so I could come back to him strong. So it’s a little bit odd to have the main character that I want to write about in life coming in second to that,” he laughs.
  The title of ‘The Gods of Guilt’ refers to the jury Mickey Haller faces in the courtroom, but it also has a personal resonance for Mickey himself. “He’s seeking redemption for things he has done in his professional life,” says Connelly, “but also in terms of very damaging things that have happened to people in his personal life.”
  Indeed, it’s Mickey Haller’s personal life, and his growth as a character, that has ensured Michael Connelly is no longer ‘all about Harry Bosch’.
  “I’m finding that the Lincoln Lawyer series is cycling the way the Bosch series did, just ten years later. I think it took me four or five Bosch books to really put that series on a plane where it was about Harry and his character, where I was thinking about that first before I got into thoughts about plot. This is the fifth time I’ve put Mickey centre-stage, and I’m thinking more about him as a person, or a character, and how he sleeps at night and how he lives. So I feel good about that.”
  Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller have intersected in previous Connelly novels, and do so again in ‘The Gods of Guilt’, when the pair meet in a courthouse hallway. Bosch is a cop, a man driven to bring the bad guys to justice; Haller is a defence lawyer, whose job it often is to see that his client – bad or otherwise – gets acquitted.
  “It’s funny,” says Connelly, “but somebody said this great line – ‘Harry Bosch is driven by justice, and Mickey Haller is driven by a chauffeur.’ That really underlines how different they are.”
  Is the contrast between the half-brothers, who have been appearing in alternate novels of late and have much in common in their personal lives, including teenage daughters, a deliberate ploy by Connelly?
  “What’s deliberate about it is that I also have a daughter who is the same age as those girls,” he says, “and I think what I’m doing is that with one guy [Harry Bosch], and lucky for him, I’m writing about a father-daughter relationship that’s working – tentative but working. And then there’s one that’s not working. So on the one hand I’m working on what I don’t want to happen to me, and on the other hand I’m writing about what I think would be cool to have happen to me.” He shrugs, then grins. “I mean, it could all shift around. You never know.”
  ‘The Gods of Guilt’ is Michael Connelly’s 26th crime novel, although he’s wary of pigeon-holing himself as any particular kind of author. “I really don’t go for any kind of classifications,” he says. “People say I’m a mystery writer, but I don’t even classify myself as an American writer – I’m just a writer.”
  His enduring love affair with writing began while he was at college, and happened to see Robert Altman’s film of the Raymond Chandler novel ‘The Long Goodbye’. He immediately read and re-read all of Chandler’s novels, then packed in his engineering course and went home to announce that he was becoming a writer. His father suggested he become a policeman, to learn the world of crime from the inside, but, he says, “to become a detective you’ve got to spend years in a uniform and being that kind of cop first. And I didn’t think I had the personality or desire to go through that. So going the Joseph Wambaugh route, where you do the work and then write about it, was knocked off early. Then the journalism idea came up, and that sounded good to me.”
  Connelly spent six years working the crime beat as a journalist in Florida and wound up being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Offered a job with the LA Times, he moved in 1987 to California, the spiritual home of the private eye novel. His debut novel, ‘The Black Echo’, was published in 1992. It featured Harry Bosch, a LAPD detective, but Connelly never lost sight of his first literary love, the private eye novel.

  “Since the very first book I’ve always had the idea that Harry would be an outsider with an insider’s job,” he says, “but every step of the way he would feel like an outsider. That’s the feeling I got, and the inspiration I got, from Chandler’s books. I was a journalist for a long time before I started writing these books and so there was a practical aspect when it came to deciding what I was going to write. Do I ignore all the years I spent in police stations and talking to detectives and learning about their world, and just go off and write a private eye novel because I love those novels? No. I was practical. I wanted to get published. I followed the path of what I knew I could bring to the genre. So I made Harry Bosch a cop, but I certainly brought everything I’d learned from Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler to the character.”
  “In my mind I visualise any Harry Bosch story, even though he’s a cop and there’s all kinds of people at his disposal, forensics and so forth, I’ve always just viewed him in a tunnel by himself – the case is the tunnel he’s going through,” he continues. “When I think of Mickey Haller, the visual image has a lot of people in it – it’s a courtroom full of people. So one is more of a private investigation, and one is more of a public examination.”
  The good news for Harry Bosch fans is that the detective will soon feature in his own TV series – Connelly oversaw the shooting of the pilot show before coming to Ireland. “I’m an executive producer,” he says, “and I co-wrote the script with Eric Overmyer, who worked on the The Wire and Treme, he’s a really good writer. So Harry Bosch is in really good hands, I think.”
  Better still is the news that, even if Bosch is forced to retire as a cop in the next couple of books, he will very likely reinvent himself as a fully-fledged private eye, the classic romantic tarnished knight of the genre. Could Harry go to work for Mickey Haller?
  “That’s an option,” says Connelly, “but that’d mean Harry would be working to help Mickey ameliorate the situations of some bad guys. I don’t see Harry being able to do that. If anything I can see Harry and Mickey on opposite sides.
  “I can see him being the kind of private eye who maybe comes in a does cases he’s not even asked to do,” he continues, “something he’ll see in the paper, some injustice or some need for justice, that’s what will get him going. So yeah, there could be some cool stuff ahead.”

  ‘The Gods of Guilt’ by Michael Connelly is published by Orion (€19.99).

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Review: IDENTICAL by Scott Turow

Scott Turow was once described by Time magazine as ‘the bard of the litigious age’, but most of Identical (Mantle), his 10th novel, takes place outside of the courtroom. Indeed, as the story opens in 2008, it’s almost 25 years since Cassian Gianis was tried and convicted – after pleading guilty – for the murder of his then girlfriend, Dita Kronon. Cassian’s imminent release from prison coincides with an election campaign being waged by his identical twin brother Paul, formerly a successful lawyer and now a politician, who is ahead in the polls as he runs for the position of mayor. Paul has reckoned without Hal Kronon, however, Dita’s billionaire brother, who is convinced that Paul had a part to play in Dita’s death and is determined that Paul should be brought to justice.
  As the names suggest, Identical takes place in the Greek-American community that has established a significant presence in Turow’s recurring fictional setting of Kindle County, although Turow has one eye on a much older Greek culture. Hal’s father is called Zeus, and Tim Brodie, the private investigator Hal employs, has a particular fondness for reading Greek mythology. It is Brodie who amplifies the motif of identical twins that lies at the heart of the novel, specifically referencing the myth of Castor and Pollux, a story that in part provides the inspiration for the tragedy that subsequently engulfs the characters.
  A quirky bunch of characters they are, too. Tim Brodie is an unconventional private eye, an 83-year-old retiree bordering on senility who is still in mourning over the recent loss of his wife. Evon Miller, reprised from the novel Personal Injuries (1999), is a gay ex-FBI agent struggling to extricate herself from an emotionally destructive relationship. Paul Gianis, meanwhile, is that most unlikely of creations, a former lawyer and aspiring politician whose idealism still outweighs his pragmatism, a man whose faltering bid for power in 2008 is obliquely cross-referenced with the gathering momentum of Barack Obama’s campaign for presidential election.
  All told, it’s an absorbing thriller that boasts its fair share of twists and turns as the characters become increasingly entangled in a legal cat’s cradle that is further complicated by updated DNA identification techniques that weren’t available to the investigating team 25 years previously. Rooted in Greek mythology, the novel is an ambitious attempt to blend ancient and modern storytelling forms, in the process reminding us that human nature has changed far less in the intervening three thousand years than might have been hoped, particularly when it comes to our more venal instincts.
  Surprisingly, however, Identical is most effective when Turow turns from the public and the political to the private and the personal. A variety of expressions of love and loss are explored in considerable depth here, often in very moving and unsettling ways. The result is a novel that is utterly fascinated by character, and especially with how love can twist us into creatures unrecognisable even to ourselves when we seek to defend and protect those we love at any cost. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

The 12 Days of Kindle: Declan Burke

Due to the good works of the folk at Liberties Press, I have two titles included in the current ‘12 Days of Kindle’ promotion, SLAUGHTER’S HOUND and ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, both of which are available as e-books for the princely sum of £0.99. Both books were shortlisted for the Irish Books of the Year awards in recent times, and ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL won the Goldsboro Award for comic crime fiction at Bristol’s Crimefest in 2012. If you feel moved to share this information with anyone you know, I would be very grateful indeed …
  For all the details, clickety-click here …

A Year In Reading: 2013

I don’t know if they’re the ‘best’ books of the year but the following are those I enjoyed most from the 100+ books I read this year. Not all of them, of course, were first published in 2013. In the order in which I read them:

Red Sky in Morning, Paul Lynch.
Charlotte Gray, Sebastian Faulks.
Harvest, Jim Crace.
Alex, Pierre Lemaitre.
Home Fires, Elizabeth Day.
Hammett Unwritten, Owen Fitzstephen.
Black Bear, Aly Monroe.
Bogmail, Patrick McGinley.
Bad Monkey, Carl Hiaasen.
Graveland, Alan Glynn.
A Delicate Truth, John Le Carré.
The Twelfth Department, William Ryan.
Gold Coast, Elmore Leonard.
The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler.
I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, Sylvie Simmons.
Angel City, Jon Steele.
The Cuckoo’s Calling, Robert Galbraith.
Tapping the Source, Kem Nunn.
In the Morning I’ll Be Gone, Adrian McKinty.
Red or Dead, David Peace.
Hide & Seek, Xan Fielding.
The Convictions of John Delahunt, Andrew Hughes.
Tampa, Alissa Nutting.
An Officer and a Spy, Robert Harris.
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen.
The Black Life, Paul Johnston.
When Eight Bells Toll, Alistair Maclean.
The Little Drummer Girl, John Le Carré.
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad.
The Stone Boy, Sophie Loubiere.
Marathon Man, William Goldman.
The Goodbye Look, Ross Macdonald.

  And that’s pretty much it from Crime Always Pays for 2013. A very happy Christmas to you all, folks, and thanks so much for stopping by during the year. I’ll see you all in 2014 …

Nobody Ever Knows What Anybody Else Will Do

John Connolly, talking about the enduring appeal of the crime / mystery novel, expresses it best for me with the deliciously pithy, “Character is mystery.”
  I’ve come across two variations on that notion in the last week or so, in Raymond Chandler’s THE LADY IN THE LAKE and Ross Macdonald’s THE GOODBYE LOOK. Chandler first:

  “Nobody ever knows what anybody else will do, sister. A cop knows that much.”

  And Macdonald:

  “That was good timing,” she said to me. “You never know what George is going to do.”
  “Or anybody else.”

  All of which makes a mockery of the rule that people should always behave ‘in character’ in novels. If everyone always behaved as they should, life and fiction would be very boring indeed.

A Secret Passion For Mercy

Justice as blood, agony and revenge came up in William Goldman’s MARATHON MAN a week or so ago, but Ross Macdonald’s private detective Lew Archer offers a rather different take in THE GOODBYE LOOK. To wit:

  “That isn’t your real motivation,” [she said]. “I know your type. You have a secret passion for justice. Why don’t you admit it?”
  “I have a secret passion for mercy,” I said. “But justice is what keeps happening to people.”

  Mercy isn’t a quality we usually associate with the crime / mystery / thriller genre, but it’s probably why Ross Macdonald is one of the enduring greats, and why he is considered a superior – or more sophisticated, at least – writer when compared to his predecessors, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
  I still hold a candle for Chandler, but maybe that’s because I’ve read virtually everything Chandler wrote and I’ve only read four or five of Macdonald’s novels so far.
  Tobias Jones had a very nice piece on Ross Macdonald in the Guardian way back in 2009, in which he writes about the evolution of Macdonald as a writer, from being a disciple of Hammett and Chandler to outstripping both in terms of his ambition for the private detective novel. He also quotes Macdonald on plot:

“It should be as complex as contemporary life, but balanced enough to say true things about it. The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.”

  The full piece is here …

Declan Hughes: All The Things He Is

Get out the red carpet. Declan Hughes - award-winning playwright, creator of the brilliant Ed Loy private eye series and 2014’s International Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin - returns to the crime writing fray early next year with ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE (Severn House), a standalone thriller set in Madison, Wisconsin. To wit:

Danny Brogan burned his future wife’s family to death when he was eleven years old ...
  Knocking on forty, with her youthful dreams of being an actress in dust, there’s no doubt in her mind suburban wife and mother of two Clare Taylor has settled. A wild week in Chicago may have shaken things up a bit, but as she turns her key in her Madison, Wisconsin home on the eve of Halloween, she knows that what happened with her ex-boyfriend was nothing more than a distraction, that this is where her life is.
  Except it’s all gone. The furniture gone, the house stripped, her husband Danny, her daughters, all gone; no message, no note, nothing. Outside in the dark, searching for a sign, she steps in one: the eviscerated body of the family dog.
  By dawn the next morning, her (as far as she knew, mortgage-free) home has been foreclosed against, one of Danny’s childhood friends lies dead in her backyard, and Clare is caught up in a nightmare that began with her husband on Halloween night, 1976, and that reaches its terrifying climax thirty five years later.
  ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE explores the dark paradox at the heart of the American Dream: that you can change, and become whoever you decide to be – but that your past is always out there, waiting. No matter how far you run, you can’t escape it – but if things work out, and love abides, maybe you don’t need to. Maybe, at last, you can become who you always were, who you’d always dreamed you’d be.

  ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE will be published in February.

Crime Always Pays: The Stamp of Approval

The good people at Severn House have forwarded on the cover for CRIME ALWAYS PAYS, which they will publish in the UK next March (and in the US in July), and with which I’m very happy indeed. I love the idea of a stamp as a book cover – CAP is a comedy crime caper set in the Greek islands, and the cover perfectly captures the kind of escapist fun I was aiming for with the story. Of all my books, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS was the most fun to write, and I’m delighted that that’s reflected in the cover. Here’s hoping that you all enjoy it too …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Luca Veste

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?
Difficult question straight out the block! I would have said something classic before this year, such as a Mark Billingham, Steve Mosby or Elmore Leonard possibly. However, this year I read THE SHINING GIRLS [by Lauren Beukes] and have been thinking about off and on ever since. A time-travelling serial killer ... why the hell didn’t I think of that?!

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
I read mostly within the genre of crime, with some horror, and the very odd sci-fi or fantasy novel. So, most characters in crime fiction we meet at their lowest ebb, horror characters are generally going through some very scary shit stuff. I’d have to learn all sorts of new stuff for Sci-Fi and Fantasy characters and I’m very lazy. I’ll go for Windsor Horne Lockwood III from Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar series. Endless pots of cash, awesome fighting skills, and charisma to boot. What’s not to like?

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t really call anything I read a ‘guilty pleasure’ as I’m quite okay with anything I choose to read - no matter what it does for hard fought for street cred. YA is probably on the low-end of the street-cred spectrum (bizarrely), so I guess I’ll say Michael Grant’s GONE series. Superb characters, pacing, and pathos. There’s tons of great stuff happening in the YA genre that is often overlooked.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Any time I get what is in my head down in words is extremely satisfying. To choose a specific moment however, it was writing the final words of the first draft of DEAD GONE. Back then, it was called something different, was 25,000 words shorter than what it is now, has a completely different second half, and a really weird timeline. But, I finished a novel for the first time. The idea of sitting and writing 80-100,000 words was so completely foreign to me, that even getting into the tens of thousands was a bit special. Actually finishing the book ... that was a big moment. A more satisfying moment may be coming up however, when I finally put the second book to bed. Now that has been a difficult process ...

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
I imagine you get some really classic answers for this question, with the rich history the genre has in Ireland. It’s also a great time in Irish crime fiction, with the likes of Jane Casey, William Ryan, and Tana French. However, I think there’s an absolute star in Irish crime fiction right now in Stuart Neville. THE TWELVE is one of the best debut novels I’ve ever read, and would be heartily recommended to all.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
If I was being truthful, I’d go for Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE again here (seriously, it’s that good ... read it if you haven’t already), but that would be cheating, probably. I’ll also discount what I would go for second, as that would be ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL by some bloke called Declan Burke or something, as he appears to be asking the questions. That would make for a very trippy movie. Instead, I’ll go for BROKEN HARBOUR by Tana French. Everything about that novel screams for a movie to be made. It would be a very bleak film, but excellent I think.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Best thing – Sitting down and putting words onto paper/screen, making characters come to life which have until then existed only as fragmented thoughts. Worst thing – Sitting down and being unable to put those fragmented thoughts onto paper/screen, as they make no sense when made reality.

The pitch for your next book is …?
DEAD GONE is about a serial killer weaving his merry way through the streets of Liverpool, killing victims using infamous psychological experiments. With each victim comes a connection to the City of Liverpool University and a note explaining the experiment carried out. DI Murphy and DS Rossi are on the case, soon realising they’re facing a killer unlike one they’ve ever faced before .. .one who kills to discover more about life.

Who are you reading right now?
I’m reading two books at the moment (one paper, one ebook – I’m having the best of both worlds). One is A TAP ON THE WINDOW by Linwood Barclay – the usual ‘extraordinary things happening to ordinary people’-style thriller, which always works for me. The other, THE TESTIMONY by James Smythe – I’ve only just started reading this, after putting it down in favour of other stuff a month or so ago. Something’s happened, some kind of "event", and people are telling the story after it has occurred. No idea what’s going on at the moment, but I’m enjoying it!

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Does he also ask me which one of my two daughters is my favourite? Or Steven Gerrard vs Kenny Dalglish for favourite ever Liverpool player? I don’t like this God guy ... he is unnecessarily mean with his demands. I’ll go for read. And then like the good recovering Catholic I am, completely ignore God and write in secret, only no one could ever see it...

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Dark, uncompromising, and twisted.

Luca Veste’s debut is DEAD GONE.

Morning Glory

I mentioned last week that Eoin McNamee’s BLUE IS THE NIGHT will complete his ‘Blue Trilogy’, and fellow Northern Irishman Adrian McKinty also concludes a trilogy with IN THE MORNING I’LL BE GONE (Serpent’s Tail), the third in a series featuring the RUC’s Sean Duffy. To wit:

It’s 1983 and Sean Duffy’s life has hit what looks like rock bottom. Humiliated by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and stripped of his rank, with no social life, no one to love, he is wasting his time away. He has no plan and no desire to get one. While Sean has sunk so low, his school friend - and rival - Dermot McCann has risen up the ranks of the IRA before being fitted up by the RUC and sent to serve at Her Majesty’s pleasure at the notorious Maze prison. So, when Sean gets a late-night call to duty because Dermot and his comrades have made a daring escape, all their history comes back to him. And as Sean stands at a road-block in the pouring rain, on a country lane in the dark, he has plenty of time to think about Dermot McCann. And he knows, with the chilly certainty of a fairy story, that their paths will cross again.

  IN THE MORNING I’LL BE GONE will be published in January.

Review: THE MEMORY KEY by Conor Fitzgerald

The fourth novel to feature Conor Fitzgerald’s Rome-based Commissioner Alec Blume, THE MEMORY KEY (Bloomsbury) opens with Blume being called to the scene of an apparent assassination – a young student called Sofia Fontana, who has been shot by a sniper. Fontana, it transpires, was the only witness to a previous shooting, when a former terrorist was also shot, and also by a sniper. Blume’s investigations lead him into the murky world of 1970’s terrorist activities in Italy, as those responsible for a murderous train station bomb some four decades previously clean up the loose ends that could trip up their political futures. As has been the case with Fitzgerald’s previous novels, Rome is something of a character in its own right here, particularly as the labyrinthine nature of its policing contributes handsomely to a claustrophobic tale. Blume, American by birth but a naturalised Italian, makes for a classic crime fiction staple, the insider with the cynical outsider’s eye, and THE MEMORY KEY, which again boasts Fitzgerald’s terse but lyrical style, is another excellent police procedural in an increasingly impressive body of work. – Declan Burke

Three Colours: Blue

The concluding act in Eoin McNamee’s ‘Blue Trilogy’, following on from THE BLUE TANGO (2001) and ORCHID BLUE (2010), BLUE IS THE NIGHT (Faber & Faber) arrives in mid-March. To wit:

1949. Lance Curran is set to prosecute a young man for a brutal murder, in the ‘Robert the Painter’ case, one which threatens to tear society apart. In the searing July heat, corruption and justice vie as Harry Ferguson, Judge Curran’s fixer, contemplates the souls of men adrift, and his own fall from grace with the beautiful and wilful Patricia. Within three years, Curran will be a judge, his nineteen year old daughter dead at the hands of a still unknown murderer, and his wife Doris condemned to an asylum for the rest of her days.
  In BLUE IS THE NIGHT, it is Doris who finally emerges from the fog of deceit and blame to cast new light into the murder of her daughter, as McNamee once again explores and dramatizes a notorious and nefarious case.

  THE BLUE TANGO was longlisted for the Booker Prize, of course, and David Peace describes BLUE IS THE NIGHT as ‘A genuine, original masterpiece.’ If it’s not one of the highlights of 2014, I’ll very surprised indeed.

Is It Safe?

I mentioned earlier in the week that I’ve been struggling for the last while with a new book, so God only knows what possessed me to read William Goldman’s MARATHON MAN again. I’ve loved that book for about 30 years now, give or take, and to read it now suggests that I harbour a self-destructive (and possibly masochistic) streak a mile wide. If you’re ever seriously doubting your ability to write a good thriller, and need that one last nudge that will tip you over the edge and take your typewriter / laptop with you into the abyss, just read MARATHON MAN and go gently into that good night, amen, etc.
  (Writing Tip to Self: try having interesting things happen to interesting people in a blackly humorous way on nearly every page. It’s worth a shot, at least, surely?)
  Anyway, given that we all know that the whole point of the crime / mystery novel is the righting of wrongs and the pursuit of justice, the following passages leapt out at me:

‘Police?’ Babe blinked. ‘Police? Why should I call them, what good would that do?’ He buttoned the raincoat. ‘I don’t want justice, are you kidding, screw justice, we’re way past justice, it’s blood now …’ (pg 227)

  And again:

‘Well, we’ve been making a mistake with people like you, because public trials are bullshit and executions are games for winners – all this time we should have been giving back pain. That’s the real lesson. That’s the loser’s share, just pain, pure and simple, pain and torture, no hotshot lawyers running around trying to see that justice is done. I think we’d have a nice peaceful place here if all you war-makers knew you better not start something because if you lost, agony was just around the bend.’ (pg 273)

  So – what exactly is it crave from our deliciously escapist crime / thriller fiction? Justice? Or blood and agony?

The Horror, The Horror

I’ve been working away on a new book for the last couple of months, which is always great fun, although in the last few weeks it seems to have run into sand. Not unusual, if my previous experience is anything to go by, and probably not the last time this particular book will find itself in trouble. Anyway, I was reading HEART OF DARKNESS again last week, when this passage, from roughly the halfway point, leapt out at me. Marlow’s steamboat is falling apart for the want of rivets, but he’s fond of it all the same:

“It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to my influential friend, the battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. I clambered on board. She rang under my feet like an empty Huntley & Palmers biscuit-tin kicked along a gutter; she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape, but I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit – to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work, – no man does – but I like what is in the work, – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”

  It’s hard to believe that the ‘battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot’ steamboat, at least during this passage, doesn’t represent ‘the work’ of writing the book itself, the opportunity to ‘find out what I could do’. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it, given that I’m up the proverbial creek myself without so much as a paddle or a handful of rivets. Maybe that’s also why this re-read of HEART OF DARKNESS put me in mind of MOBY-DICK, and that ‘the horror, the horror’ is that of the blank page.
  Tune in next week, when I read THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS and reconfigure ‘messing about in boats’ as a cry for help from an author becalmed in the backwater of a first draft, pulled hither and yon by the gentle ripples and eddies of pitiless fate, etc …

Review: THE BLACK LIFE by Paul Johnston

Paul Johnston’s The Black Life (Crème de la Crime, €18.99), his sixth to feature the Greek-Scottish private detective Alex Mavros, is rooted in the past, although it’s a past that becomes more relevant with each passing day. Hired to investigate the apparently miraculous reappearance of Aron Samuel, a Jewish man thought to have died in Auschwitz, Mavros travels to the city of Thessalonika. Soon he finds himself embroiled in a tale that links the extermination camps of the Third Reich with the recent rise of the fascist Greek political party, Phoenix Rises. What follows is a powerful novel on many levels. Johnston doesn’t shy away from describing the hellish activities at Auschwitz, and he further explores the extent of the collaboration that existed between Greek citizens and the German authorities when it came to deporting the Jewish population of Thessalonika. He also investigates the activities of those Jewish men and women who took their revenge on former Nazis in the post-WWII years, weaving the narrative strands through a political tapestry that includes the beliefs of Mavros himself, whose own family suffered terribly for their Communist leanings during the reign of the Colonels. Harrowing in places, it’s a gripping private eye novel that offers a chilling snapshot of modern Greece. – Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

Crash And Byrne

Pat Fitzpatrick gets in touch to let us know that he has just published KEEP AWAY FROM THOSE FERRARIS, a thriller set in the throes of the Irish economic collapse. To wit:

Reporter Noel Byrne is about to die. Two snipers hold him in their crosshairs as he delivers his live report from the HQ of HiberBank in central Dublin. His first problem is they will kill him if he doesn’t say exactly what they want him to say. His second problem? They both want him to say different things. KEEP AWAY FROM THOSE FERRARIS is the story of a country in collapse. A vicious gang of bankers and minor celebrities is desperately trying to salvage one last pay day from the wreckage of the Irish economy. Only Byrne can help them. Only Byrne can stop them. Follow him across the boardrooms, bedrooms and bars of Dublin as he tries to stay one step ahead. And remember that when billions are at stake you can’t trust anyone. Not your family, your friends or the love of your life.

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

Child’s Play

I had an interview with Lee Child (right) published in the Irish Examiner last weekend. It ran a lot like this:

He describes Tom Cruise as ‘a dog for work’, but Lee Child is no slouch himself when it comes to putting in hours at the desk. He has published at least one book per year since his award-winning debut Killing Floor appeared in 1997, in the process creating one of the most iconic and enduring figures in contemporary fiction. His latest offering, Never Go Back, is the 18th novel to feature the hulking loner Jack Reacher, the ex-Military Policeman who prowls the highways and byways of America, talking soft and carrying a big stick as he faces down a bewildering array of bad guys.
  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, runs the old saw, especially when the ‘it’ has resulted in sales in excess of 40 million books worldwide. But Child is acutely aware of how long Reacher has been on the road, and how implausible his journey grows with each succeeding story.
  “Technically I’m probably better at it than I was when I started out, so it won’t be for a lack of ability,” he says when I ask how long he can continue spinning plates on Reacher’s behalf. “But yeah, I am somewhat floored by the absurdity of it all by now – I mean, how many books can you write about the same guy? And that’s something that’s on my mind at the moment. I do not want to be the guy who sticks around one year too long.”
  We meet in Derry, where Lee Child is appearing at ‘Killer Books’, a crime writing festival held as part of the City of Culture 2013 celebrations. He makes for an engagingly forthright interviewee, and shares with Jack Reacher an impressive physical presence, a laconic sense of humour and a reluctance to suffer fools gladly.
  That latter quality came to the fore last year, when Tom Cruise played the lead role in the movie Jack Reacher despite protests from fans who believed that Cruise simply wasn’t tall enough to measure up.
  “We all knew – Tom included – that he didn’t look like Reacher as he’s written in the books,” he says, “but we gambled he could nail the internals and the intangibles of the character, and I think he succeeded 100%. I got to know him a little bit over the months and what struck me was two things: he’s a trooper who works like a dog, and he has an unbelievable instinct for story.”
  Child made his storytelling bones as Jim Grant, working as a presentation director for Granada TV from 1997 to 1995, where he was involved in shows as diverse as Brideshead Revisited, Prime Suspect and The Jewel in the Crown. “It was real fun to be back on a set,” he says of his cameo as a desk sergeant in Jack Reacher, and it won’t be his last. “The team that put the first movie together did so because they’re Reacher fans, simple as that,” he says, “so their desire is to make lots of them. Will the money men agree? Probably, because the financials on the first were respectable. And yes, I’m going to insist on a ‘Hitchcock’ every time.”
  Made redundant from Granada in 1995, and steeped in storytelling, Jim Grant turned to writing thrillers to pay the mortgage, choosing the pen-name Child because it would place him on the bookshelves between Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie.
  “I’ve always been in showbiz,” he says, “so a pseudonym is not a new thing for me. Over the years I’ve had five or six different names I’ve worked under. I was contracted to Granada for a long time, so if I wanted to do anything else, moonlighting, I had to do it under a pseudonym. So this is perfectly normal for me. People ask why I chose to use a pen-name, and it’s actually the other way around – as in, why wouldn’t I? It frees you up. It’s not quite you, and therefore the praise doesn’t quite turn your head and the criticism doesn’t really hurt.”
  The praise has been effusive over the years, and includes a plethora of awards, but Child takes exception to the way the crime / thriller genre is criticised, and particularly in terms of its use of language.
  “One of the thing that the genre gets criticised for is the writing,” he says. “I mean, you’ll get a review that says, ‘This is not great writing, but it’s a hell of a page-turner.’ And I think that that is, objectively, a very stupid comment. Because if a book is a page-turner, then why is it a page-turner? I think every writer, deliberately or instinctively, writes to a certain style, so that the story is propulsive, like a sprung rhythm, always moving forward. So the technique is actually the best part of it. And it’s extremely efficient, purposeful writing that produces that kind of result.”
  The latest novel, Never Go Back, has something of a tongue-in-cheek title. For the past four books now, since 2010’s 61 Hours, Reacher has been attempting to make his way back from the wild west to Washington DC in order to meet Susan Turner, a woman he knows only from his dealings on the phone, and who currently holds Reacher’s former position with the Military Police.
  Things, you won’t be surprised to learn, do not go to plan. Susan Turner is utterly different to how Reacher had pictured her in his head. Four books after he first imagined her, Susan Turner also arrived on the page very differently to how Lee Child had originally perceived her character.
  “Yeah, and part of the reason is that she had a different name in the first draft of that book where we first meet her. Then there was a charity auction, where someone could ‘buy’ their name into one of my stories, and the character’s name changed to Susan Turner. And that’s a kind of plain name, so that did have an effect on how I saw her.
  “The interesting thing about Susan for me is how easily she dismisses Reacher,” he continues, “which I think is good for him. And I think that’s good for me as a writer as well, because I think the biggest possible mistake you can make with a series is to fall in love with your character. To always let him have his own way. I’m perfectly happy for people to say no to Reacher, or that he occasionally fails, or gets disappointed. That’s fine. I mean, maybe readers are going to think, ‘How can any woman turn Reacher down?’ But I’m like, screw it, turn him down. That’s life. Even for Reacher.”

  I ask about that delightfully bonkers story from earlier this year, when a British tabloid quoted Lee Child as saying he wrote his books whilst high as a kite.
  “I’ve never written high,” he says forcefully. “Actually, what bothered me about that piece was how it made me sound – I mean, what a half-hearted drug fiend I am. I only smoke weed five nights a week, and take the weekend off?” He laughs. “No, they got it backwards. I’ll have a smoke in the evenings, sure, which relaxes me, and it also helps to unwind plot points in the story. It’s a great clarifier. But I don’t write while I’m stoned, because the writing’s never any good.”
  So how does he write? Is he a meticulous plotter, micro-managing the story right to the end before he starts typing his first line?
  “For me it’s completely organic,” he says. “The new one, which is due next year, I’m about a fifth of the way through it and I still have no idea of what it’s about, what’s going to happen or what the issue is, nothing like that.
  “The upside to not having a plan,” he adds, “is that I’m as keen as the reader to find out what will happen next. For me it’s always exciting. I end a chapter, and it’s not an artifice, not really – I’m like, ‘Wow, what’s happening now?’
  “You can’t fake it,” he says. “You’ve got to be interested in it yourself. You can immediately tell, I think, when people have run out of gas and they’re phoning it in. That’s why the system I use is to write and see what happens. As a writer I suffer from that illusion, even though I’m a rational person, that while I’m writing it’s all actually happening. That this is happening. Sometimes my editor will say, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if this took place after this bit does?’ And I’ll say, ‘Yeah, probably. But it didn’t.’”

  Never Go Back by Lee Child is published by Bantam Press.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Through A Mirror, Darkly

I don’t know how exactly many Irish crime writers were born in Baghdad, but I’d imagine the number is vanishingly small. Or one, to be precise. DARK MIRRORS (Poolbeg) is the debut offering from Siobháin Bunni, with the blurb running thusly:

Esmée Myers, once an impassioned woman, is living a life where her only excitement is the laundry and the children. Her relationship with her husband leaves a lot to be desired, but she is content to focus on providing emotional stability and security for her two young children. For her husband, Philip, she is no more than a housekeeper, childminder and cleaner, easy to betray but not so easy to fool ... When Esmée becomes convinced that Philip is having an affair, she secretly plans to leave him and set up a new home with the children. Finally making the break, she feels she can look forward to a bright and fulfilling future. Then Philip disappears without trace, leaving only his car standing on a clifftop. Though no body is found, the police deduce he has committed suicide. Esmée, however, thinks otherwise. What begins as a carefully planned escape from a maudlin and tedious relationship descends into something much darker as layer by layer Esmée strips back the last ten years of her life with a man it turns out she never really knew.

  For a Dublin Books Festival interview with Siobháin, clickety-click here …