Review: THE FREE by Willy Vlautin

I had the pleasure of interviewing Willy Vlautin yesterday, who was in town to promote his latest novel, THE FREE (Faber). I reviewed the book for the Irish Independent last weekend. It ran like this:

Once best known as a singer-songwriter with the alt-country outfit Richmond Fontaine, Willy Vlautin has garnered an increasingly impressive reputation as a novelist since the release of his debut, The Motel Life (2006). His fourth book, The Free, is set in the American northwest, and opens with wounded soldier Leroy Kervin, a veteran of the Iraq conflict, attempting to commit suicide during a rare moment of clarity.
  Leroy fails in his bid but remains in a coma in hospital, which allows Vlautin to introduce characters who are directly affected by Leroy’s actions. Pauline, a hard-pressed hospital nurse who cares for her housebound father and tries to help a vulnerable patient, the teenage girl Jo, to escape the clutches of a group of heroin addicts; and Freddie, who works a nightshift at the group home where Leroy lived while also holding down a day job at a paint store. Meanwhile, Leroy’s comatose mind drifts into the realms of fantasy as he imagines himself on the run in a post-apocalyptic America, where vigilantes roam the streets killing people stained with ‘the mark’.
  The Free is an ironic title here, given that Vlautin’s story revolves around characters who live regimented lives in which every minute and every last cent must be accounted for. The hardworking Freddie and Pauline are victims of the economic crash and personal circumstance: Pauline supports her helpless father, while Freddie remortgages his house twice to pay for his daughter’s medical bills. Told in the ‘dirty realist’ style that evokes the spirit of Raymond Carver, the novel is a litany of tiny tragedies that brilliantly evokes the soul-destroying monotony of functioning poverty.
  If it’s a bleak read in that respect, The Free is nevertheless an uplifting tale. Not only do the debt-ridden Freddie and Pauline rarely complain about their daily drudge, they also find it within them to stretch their personal resources to breaking point by investing themselves emotionally in other people. Pauline’s repeated attempts to rescue Jo add an unnecessary strain on her already overloaded schedule, while Freddie finds time to visit Leroy in hospital, and further tries to help out an old friend who is going to prison.
  There is a danger, of course, that Vlautin’s variations on the theme of the kindness of strangers might render Pauline and Freddie secular saints, but he never mistakes sentiment for sentimentality. Both characters are aware of their own failings and shortcomings, and are likeably honest about their limitations.
  The downbeat, fatalistic tone (and the dystopian strain to Leroy’s sci-fi fantasy) suggests that Vlautin has in mind here a commentary on how the US government has abandoned its responsibility to its own citizens over the last decade. What makes The Free a compelling read, however, is the way in which he celebrates the indomitable spirit and invisible heroics of those refuse to accept an imposed bondage in the land of the brave and the home of the free. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Independent.

A River Twists Through It

Siobhan MacDonald (right) will publish her debut, TWISTED RIVER (Exhibit A Books) later this year, the first signing by new Exhibit A editor Byron Quertermous. It’s the first of ‘two gripping, psychological, stand-alone thrillers’ (the second, THE BLUE POOL, will be published in 2015). To wit:

Kate and Mannix O’Brien live with their two children in a quirky house overlooking the Curragower Falls on the Shannon River in Limerick – a city where the haves and have-nots live cheek by jowl.
  On the other side of the Atlantic, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the Harveys own a fashionable brownstone on Riverside Drive.
  When American Oscar Harvey arrives in Limerick and opens the boot of the car his hosts have loaned him, he finds in it the body of a woman … and from this shocking beginning the story spools back to the roots of the house swap, which no one suspects will end in tragedy.

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

Through An Hourglass, Darkly

Of that small but perfectly formed generation of Irish crime writers who began publishing in the mid- to late-1990s – which included Colin Bateman, Ken Bruen, John Connolly and Eoin McNamee – one has slipped out of sight in recent times. Here’s hoping the reissue of Julie Parsons’ THE HOURGLASS (Macmillan) goes some way towards redirecting the spotlight in her direction. To wit:

Beyond high iron gates fastened shut with a length of chain, lies the stark, beautiful Trawbawn. Here, haunted by a dark, mysterious past and largely ignored by the people of nearby Skibbereen, lives the frail Lydia Beauchamp. But old Ma Beauchamp’s private existence is interrupted when a stranger arrives - a young man called Adam who wanders into the vast grounds of Trawbawn and becomes one of Lydia's most welcome contacts with the outside world. When Lydia sets her new confidante a challenge, he eagerly accepts - Adam must travel to Dublin to find her estranged daughter. But it is a task tainted by an air of menace. For what terrible past has driven a daughter from her mother? And what true motive lies behind Adam's generous act? Soon the unlikely friends are entwined in a deadly game, and a pursuit born of an old lady’s desire for peace mutates into a terrible, relentless need for revenge . . .

  THE HOURGLASS will be reissued on February 13th. For more on Julie Parsons, clickety-click here …

Interview: Adrian McKinty

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

As every good crime writer knows, desperate times call for desperate measures. So when Irish author Adrian McKinty found himself without a tree on Christmas Eve, and staring at a small forest of firs in a Melbourne suburb, he took matters – and an axe left behind by an absent Russian tree dealer – into his own hands.
  “I don’t know if that’s a year’s bad luck, or if that’s how it works,” McKinty tells me via Skype from Melbourne. “But stealing a Christmas tree – that can’t be a good thing, karma-wise.”
  It’s unlikely to be a bad year for the Carrickfergus native. In the Morning I’ll Be Gone, the third novel in McKinty’s Sean Duffy trilogy, has just been published to glowing reviews. Duffy is a Catholic policeman serving in the RUC during the 1980s, and the Troubles is about to hit another low point. The book revolves around the Brighton Bombing in 1984, when the IRA targeted Margaret Thatcher during a Conservative Party conference.
  The release of official British government documents relating to that period earlier this month gives the historical backdrop to In the Morning I’ll Be Gone another layer.
  “There was a story in the Guardian that when the Brighton bombing happened, the British government were negotiating with the IRA’s Army Council for a ceasefire, and that negotiations were quite advanced,” says McKinty. “And then the Brighton bomb happened, obviously, and those negotiations were put back by about five years. It looks to me like this was one faction of the IRA Army Council working against another faction, and that the operation hadn’t been completely authorised, or that it was a power-play within the Army Council. The whole thing is fascinating. And then there’s the fact that Thatcher escaped, as well. There’s a lot about that bombing that I think we’ll never find out the truth about.”
  Although the new book is being billed as the concluding act of a trilogy, McKinty believes that the Troubles provide a sufficiently bizarre backdrop to provide Sean Duffy with ample motive to return.
  “There’s that crazy story that no one’s ever talked about,” he says, “when Oliver North came to Ireland looking to get weapons to the Iran contras. He tried to get weapons from the UVF, and found they were a bunch of jokers. Then he tried to get them from the IRA and the IRA didn’t trust him. So then he had to go to the Israelis. That could be a fun story.
  “It certainly won’t be a Lee Child-style seventeen book cycle,” he says, “but there’s maybe a couple more Duffy stories left. That said, if I only ever write the trilogy then I’m happy enough – or as happy as I ever get in my dour Presbyterian world.”
  Renowned as a hardboiled noir novelist, McKinty set himself the challenge of including the classic mystery fiction trope of a ‘locked room mystery’ at the heart of his latest offering.
  “I’ve always been a secret locked room fanatic,” he enthuses. “I read my first one when I was about ten or eleven, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express with David Niven and Peter Ustinov on the cover. That was the first grown-up one that I’d read. It’s fantastic, this meta-theory thing where everyone is the killer, which was brilliant because I was used to reading the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and The Three Investigators. So I asked the librarian if she had any more like Orient Express. The first one I read was Murders in the Rue Morgue, which I totally hated – I just thought it was ridiculous, the idea of an orang-utan with a cut-throat razor … But then she gave me some John Dickson Carr novels, and I was hooked.
  “Later on I graduated on to noir,” he says, “and didn’t read locked room mysteries any more, but a few years ago I read one I really liked called The Tokyo Zodiac Murders [by Soji Shimada]. So I thought to myself, ‘Is it possible to do a locked room mystery within a noir setting?’ A good one, which doesn’t involve any tricks or misleading the reader. Where the reader has as much information as the detective does, and there’s no cheating, there’s no supernatural bullshit or magicians’ tricks.”
  This year will also see McKinty publish, along with co-editor Stuart Neville, the short story collection Belfast Noir. The latest in a global round of city-based collections from Akashic Books, the book will be, McKinty believes, another manifestation of a culture coming to terms with itself and its recent past.
  “I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen’s University set, in the 1970s and ’80s – y’know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson – that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic Renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory,” he says. “Those guys were kicking down the door and saying there was a high culture in Northern Ireland, and you can attain that even in the face of what must have seemed to them at the time like the abyss. Belfast was a city on fire, and there was no hope. And yet they were producing this incredible poetry. That creates a sense of confidence, culturally speaking. And in the ’90s you had people like Colin Bateman and Eoin McNamee coming along and saying, ‘It’s okay to talk about all this. We can even make fun of it. We can turn it into art.’ So all along it’s been a process of people finding the courage and the confidence to really deal with the issues.”

  That confidence isn’t limited to poetry and fiction.
  “Glenn Patterson has a story in Belfast Noir about the energy of punk music in Northern Ireland. In ’78 and ’79, Stiff Little Fingers were doing songs like ‘Suspect Device’ and ‘Alternative Ulster’. And The Undertones were creating this amazing pop music that was defiantly apolitical. But it was all about the confidence to talk about whatever you wanted to talk about. So it’s all a part of a culture that’s been slowly finding its own voice, to speak and to turn the light within, onto itself.”
  Adrian McKinty grew up in Carrickfergus but left Northern Ireland to study politics and philosophy at Oxford. He published his first novel, Everything Rhymes With Orange in 1998, but it was the publication of his acclaimed crime debut, Dead I Well May Be, that put him on the map in 2003. Since then he has published nine adult titles and a trilogy of young adult novels, placing him at the head of a generation of new Irish crime authors such as Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville, Gerard Brennan and Anthony Quinn. It’s a generation that isn’t afraid to write about Northern Ireland’s troubled past, and how history informs the present.
  “People in the North are really taciturn and reticent and they don’t really like to talk about the past,” he says. “I mean, my dad worked in the shipyards for 20 years, and I remember asking him one time about the Titanic. And he said, ‘Oh, no one ever talks about that.’ I said, ‘Seriously? You work in Harland & Wolff and no one ever talks about the Titanic?’ And he said, ‘No.’ And I think that’s just symptomatic about the whole culture. It was the same during the Troubles, there were all these things that no one wanted to talk about, lest the dyke broke and all the darkness came pouring out.
  “I’m not surprised the Richard Haass talks broke down,” he continues, “because one of the things they broke down over was the whole ‘truth commission’ idea. There was just too many people who didn’t want a ‘truth commission’. They don’t want the truth to come out. But it’s our job, as writers, to do exactly that.”

In the Morning I’ll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty is published by Serpent’s Tail.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

On Prestuplenie And Punishment

I’m treating myself to a read of Dostoevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT in a Wordsworth Classics edition at the moment, and came across the following at the end of the Introduction:

The Russian word for ‘crime’ in the title of the novel and elsewhere is prestuplenie from pre (across) and stuplenie (a stepping) – i.e. similar to the etymology of the English ‘trans-gression’. This sense of ‘stepping across’ a barrier or a moral code is missing from the word ‘crime’.

  Maybe it’s just me, although I very much doubt it, but I always assumed that the crime in any given crime novel – murder, kidnap, blackmail, etc. – is at least as important in terms of its differentiating the lawful from the unlawful (the ‘awful’?) as it is in kick-starting the story. A crime can be any specific act that is illegal or unlawful; but the act of committing a crime is always an act of transgression.

Black On Blonde

If I ever got dumped on a desert island, and was allowed to bring only one writer’s books with me, that writer would be Raymond Chandler. So I’ve been looking forward to Benjamin ‘Benny Blanco’ Black’s new Philip Marlowe novel, THE BLACK EYED BLONDE (Mantle), for about a year now. Quoth the blurb elves:

“Maybe it was time I forgot about Nico Peterson, and his sister, and the Cahuilla Club, and Clare Cavendish. Clare? The rest would be easy to put out of my mind, but not the black-eyed blonde . . .”
  It is the early 1950s. In Los Angeles, private detective Philip Marlowe is as restless and lonely as ever, and business is a little slow. Then a new client arrives: young, beautiful, and expensively dressed, Clare Cavendish wants Marlowe to find her former lover, a man named Nico Peterson. Soon Marlowe will find himself not only under the spell of the Black Eyed Blonde; but tangling with one of Bay City’s richest families – and developing a singular appreciation for how far they will go to protect their fortune . . .
  In this gripping and deeply evocative crime novel, Benjamin Black returns us to the dark, mesmerising world of Raymond Chandler’s THE LONG GOODBYE and his singular detective Philip Marlowe; one of the most iconic and enduringly popular detectives in crime fiction.

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

Mum’s The Word

Another Irish crime fiction debut to watch for in 2014 is Sinead Crowley’s CAN ANYBODY HELP ME? (Quercus), which will be published in May. To wit:

It was crazy really, she had never met the woman, had no idea of her real name but she thought of her as a friend. Or, at least, the closest thing she had to a friend in Dublin.
  Struggling with a new baby, Yvonne turns to netmammy, an online forum for mothers, for support. Drawn into a world of new friends, she spends increasing amounts of time online and volunteers more and more information about herself.
  When one of her new friends goes offline, Yvonne thinks something is wrong, but dismisses her fears. After all, does she really know this woman?
  But when the body of a young woman with striking similarities to Yvonne’s missing friend is found, Yvonne realises that they’re all in terrifying danger. Can she persuade Sergeant Claire Boyle, herself about to go on maternity leave, to take her fears seriously?

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” John Lawton

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

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
THE LAWS OF OUR FATHERS by Scott Turow. One of the few novels about us old hippies that is worth your time.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Barbarella.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Zoe Sharp … levels of shit-kicking violence that I cannot emulate and urban street-grot that make me want to live up a mountain in wilderness.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Sitting on a doorstep in Bloomsbury circa 1994 waiting for a 38 bus to Islington, armed only with a pencil and a receipt for a garden hose. A page sprang fully-formed into me head and having nowt else to write on I jotted it down on the back of the receipt. Then I thought ‘what da fukk do I do with this?’ It became the final page of OLD FLAMES and I changed not a word. Arsy and versy might apply, but a good moment all the same.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
I’m go to be very old-fashioned and betray all my contemporaries by saying THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GREY by Oscar Wilde. It must be one of the most influential tales ever written and perhaps the most invoked allusion.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Alas I know zilch about modern cinema and go about once a year. I emerge sea-sick from the pace of things, wondering if I have seen The Hobbit Part XIII, Carry On Captain Sparrow or Iron Man on the Planet of the Apes. Can I cop out and say, “Whatever Martin McDonagh decides to film next” … ?

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The Best Thing has to be just the doing of it, the act of writing. The Worst Thing is definitely dealing with the question I get asked most often … “Why did you never write another novel after BLACK OUT?”

The pitch for your next book is …?
Troy is back … younger, smaller … just as insufferable.

Who are you reading right now?
Volume 4 of Robert Caro’s THE LIVES OF LYNDON JOHNSON: 1960-64. A bit of a cheat as I have not read Vol. 3 and only bits of 1 & 2.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Oh … I’d rather be dead than make that choice. I’d say return me to star dust and zaps of interstellar carbon.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
‘Could do better’ … exactly as it said on my school reports 55 years ago. I hate to think the old bastards who pretended to teach me were right. They were a bad-mannered bunch of fascists with no respect for anyone, and violent tendencies that would see them in the lock-up ward of a loony bin these days … but I cannot deny the insight. Fukkem.

John Lawton’s THEN WE TAKE BERLIN is published by Grove Press.

Interview: Joe Joyce

I interviewed Joe Joyce (right) shortly after the publication of his novel ECHOLAND (Liberties Press) last year, and it’s fair to say the conversation was wide-ranging. Enid Blyton, John Creasey, James Joyce, Franklin Roosevelt, Nancy Drew, Bill Clinton and Charles Haughey – they’re all here. To wit:

When it comes to telling stories, Joe Joyce isn’t exactly single-minded about the form he works in. A journalist by trade, he published a pair of critically acclaimed crime thrillers in the 1990s, Off the Record (1990) and The Trigger Man (1991). He reinvented himself as a playwright for The Tower (2008), an imagined meeting between the ghosts of James Joyce and Oliver St. John Gogarty. With co-author Peter Murtagh, he has published two non-fiction titles: The Guinnesses: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Most Successful Family (2009) and The Boss (1997), an account of former taoiseach Charlie Haughey’s years in power.
  The latter book in particular was very well reviewed, although a certain Charles J. Haughey was distinctly unimpressed.
  “He was very upset by the book, apparently,” says Joyce. “There was an occasion when he was meeting the other party leaders, Garrett Fitzgerald and Dick Spring – they were in government at the time – and he got very emotional and started almost crying to them about the book. Of course, one of the things with Haughey was that you never knew when he was putting on an act. Afterwards people kept asking him to sign copies of The Boss. He always wrote the same thing, ‘There is not a word of truth in this book.’”
  He laughs quietly at Haughey’s hubris, but then presses on, keen to give both sides of the story.
  “Haughey was an intriguing character in many ways. What tends to get forgotten, I suppose, is his charisma. The only way to understand him, I think, is to look on him as an actor. He modelled himself on French presidents like Francois Mitterand, people who are really big into the idea of the royalty of power, all the symbols and all the rest of it. He never wore a watch, for example. But when he walked into a room, he was absolutely the centre of it. And it wasn’t just the women.”
  That combination of traits, the journalist’s desire to present both sides of the story and the vivid imagination that excavates a story from the bare bones of the facts, is what brings to life Joe Joyce’s latest offering, the novel Echoland. Set in Dublin in 1940, it opens with young army man Paul Duggan being promoted to G2, or Irish military intelligence, as German troops blitzkrieg their way through Europe.
  With Ireland clinging to a tenuous neutrality, and rumours of invasion growing stronger by the day, it’s a time of intrigue, betrayal and espionage.
  “It’s obviously one of the defining periods of modern Irish history,” says Joyce. “From a fictional point of view, what really interested me was trying to put myself back into that situation, which is a challenge because we all know now what happened, in order to capture the uncertainty of the time. I think we tend to look on the past as a simpler time, but that’s because we know what happened. The people of the time didn’t know what was going to happen – in fact, a lot of people thought they did know what was going to happen, and were wrong.”
  Paul Duggan and his colleagues in G2 aren’t only concerned with German spies and a possible invasion by Nazi Germany. Ireland’s neutrality was also under threat from the British, who were pressurising the then taoiseach, Eamon De Valera, to join the Allied cause. De Valera’s refusal, Joyce believes, had consequences for Ireland for decades to come.
  “I think that things would have been quite different if we hadn’t been neutral. It would have had a major effect on the later years of the 1940s, and on into the ’50s and ’60s. The more you get into that period the more you realise that the knock-on effect [of Ireland’s neutrality] probably blighted Irish-American relations up until the time of Bill Clinton. There was a serious falling-out between Franklin Roosevelt and Ireland because of it, and that had a real effect on us in the 1950s and 1960s. To the extent that, even when Kennedy came here [in 1963], he was not going to talk about Partition, he was not going to get into any of that. On the other hand,” he acknowledges, “it was perfectly understandable that Ireland would want to be neutral. It was only 20 years or so since we’d been fighting the British ourselves.”
  Despite the vividly rendered political backdrop, Joyce emphasises the fictional aspects of Echoland.
  “To me it’s an historical thriller. Hopefully it’s a good read above anything else. It’s not trying to push any particular line about neutrality or government policy or anything of a serious nature like that.”
  Can we call it an old-fashioned spy novel?
  “That’s fine with me. A spy novel, a political novel … I mean, what it’s not is a crime novel. You see these kinds of books classified as crime novels all the time, when they’re absolutely not.”
  What’s the difference between a crime novel and a spy novel?
  “To me, spy novels or political novels are more about ideas than they are about action. They involve action, of course, but they’re not about solving a particular crime. They’re usually about issues to which there is no simple or indeed complex answer. The story doesn’t resolve itself on the last page, necessarily, when the bad guy gets caught.”
  A softly-spoken, self-deprecating 65-year-old, Joyce grew up in Ballinasloe in Galway reading “all the usual Enid Blyton books, Nancy Drew, The Castle of Adventure, all that kind of stuff. I graduated – if that’s the word – to all the John Creasey’s and other big crime writers of the time, mainly from the 1930s. A lot of them seemed to involve the Riviera and jewel thieves, who I see are still in business.”

  He read English and Sociology at UCG, then embarked on a career in journalism, during which he wrote for the Guardian and the Irish Times. The publication of those critically acclaimed crime novels in the 1990s suggested that a successful career as an author beckoned, but it wasn’t to be.
  “A lot of things got in the way of the writing,” he says, “from having to earn a living to health issues. Serious health problems held me back for the best part of 10 years. Why start all over again? Because it was always something I wanted to do.”
  What got him back writing again, for the play The Tower, was an imagined conversation between the ghosts of James Joyce and Oliver St. John Gogarty. Did he ever stop to consider the audacity of writing dialogue for James Joyce?
  “I know, the arrogance of it. Jesus, when I think about it now …” He shrugs. “I hadn’t written anything for a very long time, and that was the first thing I wrote in my so-called second coming. I live quite close to the Martello tower in Sandycove, and I was just walking by it one day, wondering what these guys might say to one another if they met now.”
  Instead of the world-famous James Joyce, however, it was the largely overlooked Oliver St. John Gogarty’s reinvention of himself at an advanced age that intrigued Joe Joyce.
  “What really got me interested was when I was in Renvyle House Hotel in Connemara, which Gogarty had owned and run as a hotel, and they had various things up on the wall, framed newspapers and telegrams and so forth. They had a piece there about Gogarty leaving Ireland when he was 61, going to live in New York – and I could see that age coming at me, and it seemed like a great idea, that you could start over again at 61. So that’s what fascinated me.”
  Gogarty, who served as the inspiration for Buck Mulligan in Joyce’s Ulysses, wasn’t just a poet and author, but a politician, athlete and doctor besides.
  “Gogarty was as smart a guy as Joyce, possibly even smarter, but he was a man with too many talents. And why is one writer remembered and not the other? Basically what it came down to, I think, was discipline.” A wry smile. “With which I totally empathise.”

  Echoland by Joe Joyce is published by Liberties Press (€13.99)

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

On Killing The Competition

Northern Ireland writer Anthony Quinn had a piece titled ‘Irish Crime Writers Killing the Competition’ published in the Irish News last week, which referenced Eoin McNamee, John Connolly, Claire McGowan, Ken Bruen and Adrian McKinty, among many others. It kicked off like this:

“Irish crime fiction has risen to new heights this year with home-grown noir finally moving beyond cult status to a must-have for every discerning reader. Blame the brooding landscape, the overhang of religious guilt or the legacy of the Troubles, the imaginations of this new generation of crime writers are proving potently fertile when it comes to fictionalising violence and evil.”

  Anthony included some samples of his own recent reading as part of the piece, and was kind enough to include yours truly. To wit:

DECLAN BURKE: ‘Slaughter’s Hound’ - Serving up rampant corruption, scamming and relentlessly brutal action scenes, Burke proves that Irish crime writers can also kick ass in the blood and guts department. What sets the award-winning Sligo writer apart is his deadpan sardonic tone. If you enjoy your crime fiction hard-boiled, and haven’t read Burke, then you’re several tequila shots behind the party. Watch out for his next outing Crime Always Pays, due to be published by Severn Press in the UK in March, and in the US in July.

  For the article in its entirety, clickety-click here …

Strangers’ Dangers

Sean Farrell reviewed Michael Russell’s THE CITY OF STRANGERS (Avon) in the Irish Independent last Saturday, and was very complimentary in the process. The gist:

“As before, Russell captures the time and the mood superbly, from the novel and exhilarating experience of flying transatlantic, to the atmosphere in the US as war beckons. It is a period when the USA, and New York in particular, harbours tens of thousands of Old IRA and many more exiles and sympathisers opposed to Eamon de Valera’s Ireland and all it stands for.
  “As pro-IRA, pro-German and isolationist groups increase pressure for the US to remain neutral in any conflict, the World’s Fair itself is dominated physically by the rival pavilions of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, both offering different and unappetising visions of the future. The sense of Ireland, as a small and vulnerable nation, alone in this situation, is very well conveyed.” ~ Sean Farrell

  It may well be nothing more than coincidence, but there appears to be an interesting trend developing in Irish crime and mystery writing, in which a handful of authors are engaging with Ireland’s historical relationship with Germany. Stuart Neville’s RATLINES is the best known, but there’s also Joe Joyce’s ECHOLAND. JJ Toner’s THE BLACK ORCHESTRA is a thriller set in Germany during WWII, while Cora Harrison’s CROSS OF VENGEANCE, set in the 15th century, turns on the murder of a German pilgrim, an evangelical devotee of Martin Luther.
  For the full review of THE CITY OF STRANGERS, clickety-click here …

Oliver’s Twist

An Irish crime fiction debut to watch for this year is Liz Nugent’s UNRAVELLING OLIVER (Penguin Ireland), which is billed as ‘a gripping novel of psychological suspense’. Quoth the blurb elves:

‘I expected more of a reaction the first time I hit her.’
  Oliver Ryan is a handsome and charismatic success story. He lives in the leafy suburbs with his wife, Alice, who illustrates his award-winning children’s books and gives him her unstinting devotion. Their life together is one of enviable privilege and ease - enviable until, one evening after supper, Oliver attacks Alice and puts her into a coma.
  In the aftermath, as everyone tries to make sense of his astonishing act of savagery, Oliver tells his story. So do those whose paths he has crossed over five decades. What unfolds is a story of shame, envy, breath-taking deception and masterful manipulation.
  Only Oliver knows the lengths to which he has had to go to get the life to which he felt entitled. But even he is in for a shock when the past catches up with him.
  Liz Nugent’s gripping novel of psychological suspense, UNRAVELLING OLIVER, is a complex and elegant study of the making of a sociopath in the tradition of Barbara Vine and Patricia Highsmith.

  UNRAVELLING OLIVER arrives in early March. For all the details, clickety-click here …

Review: THE ELOQUENCE OF THE DEAD by Conor Brady

Conor Brady made his debut as a historical crime novelist with A June of Ordinary Murders (2011), and that novel’s hero, Detective Sergeant Joe Swallow of the Dublin Metropolitan Police ‘G-Men’ Division, makes a welcome return in THE ELOQUENCE OF THE DEAD (New Island). The novel opens in Galway in 1887, with Lady Gessel bidding a none-too-fond farewell to her estate as she prepares to sell her family’s ancestral home, as so many of her peers are doing, and move to England. Meanwhile, back in Dublin, Swallow is called in to investigate the murder of a pawnbroker in the Liberties area, a man who appears to have paid a very harsh price for handling stolen goods. How these events are connected gradually emerges in a propulsive but stylish tale of conspiracy and corruption on a grand scale. Swallow, a keen amateur painter, brings a sharp eye to bear on his surroundings, which in turn allows Brady to give us a vivid account of late Victorian Dublin in all its squalid glory. The result is a very satisfying police procedural / mystery and an equally fine historical novel. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times, in a column that also included reviews of the latest titles from Jo Nesbo, Sophie Loubiere, Conor Fitzgerald and John Lawton.

BELFAST NOIR; Or, Northern Ireland Is The New Black

Here’s a nice way to wake up to 2014. Over on his blog, Adrian McKinty (right) announces that the short story collection BELFAST NOIR (Akashic) has just gone off to the printer, with said tome co-edited by Adrian and Stuart Neville. Quoth Adrian:

“We were delighted to get stories from Glenn Patterson, Eoin McNamee, Garbhan Downey, Lee Child, Alex Barclay, Brian McGilloway, Ian McDonald, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Claire McGowan, Arlene Hunt, Steve Cavanagh, Lucy Caldwell, Sam Millar and Gerard Brennan. A pretty impressive list I think you’ll agree.”

  Yes, I do, especially when you add the names of McKinty and Neville to that list. Untypically, the normally reserved McKinty (koff) then makes a bold prediction about the future of Northern Irish fiction and the demise of its Scandinavian counterpart:

“I think the wheel may finally turning towards Northern Irish fiction. For years the words ‘The Troubles’, ‘Northern Ireland’ and ‘Belfast’ caused book buyers, programme makers and publishers to either shrug with indifference or shudder in horror; but the new generation of writers coming out of Belfast is so good that a previously reluctant audience has had their interest piqued. I’ve been saying on this blog for the last three years that the Scandinavian crime boom is going to end and the Irish crime boom is going to begin and I still believe that. The depth of talent is there. All it needs is a spark, hopefully Belfast Noir will add kindling to a growing fire ...”

  For all the details, clickety-click here …