“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Sinead Crowley

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?
Val McDermid’s A PLACE OF EXECUTION.

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

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t believe in guilty pleasures! Any reading is better than no reading. Yes, even books with many types of colours in their titles. But give me a decent psychological thriller with well drawn characters and a killer twist and I’m in heaven.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Any time a reader tells me they didn’t guess the ending of my novel, I’m over the moon. I wanted to write a ‘whodunnit’ and I’m delighted if people tell me they were surprised at the end.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
Tana French’s IN THE WOODS.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
It’s not technically a crime novel, but FROM OUT OF THE CITY by John Kelly would make a terrific high concept thriller.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The best thing is having a reader tell you they enjoyed the book. I find it amazing to think that this document which I slaved over for years is now out in the world and people are enjoying it. The worst thing was having to let the book go to the printers. I could have toyed with it for another five years and I still wouldn’t have been happy with it. They had to wrestle the proof from me in the end.

The pitch for your next book is …?
The second in the Sgt Claire Boyle series.

Who are you reading right now?
Louise Millar.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Read.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Slowly getting there.

Sinead Crowley’s CAN ANYBODY HELP ME? is published by Quercus.

Pierre Lamaitre in Belfast

The event is free, but pre-booking is essential. Tickets can be booked through David Torrans at No Alibis.

Do The Write Thing

It’s not very often I wind up on a list of writers alongside Raymond Chandler, Stephen King and Elmore Leonard, so it was quite the surprise to stumble across this offering from Henry Sutton over at Dead Good, in which Henry talks about ‘Writers Trapped on the Page’ (right now I seem trapped in page 2 of my work-in-progress, but that’s a conversation for another day).
  Henry, the author of MY CRIMINAL WORLD, is no stranger to the idea of a writer getting a little too involved with his characters. To wit:

“Writers have long emerged on the page in the genre’s long and bloody canon. Whether directing the action, playing havoc with the plot, or as victim or perpetrator. Often epigraphs by Friedrich Nietzsche seem to accompany these texts, particularly those that appear to address the issue of creativity itself and simply supply further proof that writing fiction can be a pretty criminal activity. Take the line by Nietzsche that Stephen King used for Misery: ‘When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.’ So the abyss is what? Writing a novel? But beware, when fully engaged with that process, weird things can happen.”

  For the full list, clickety-click here …

A Herculean Task

Agatha Christie’s BLACK COFFEE comes to Dublin’s Bord Gais Energy Theatre in June, running from Monday 23rd to Saturday 28th, with Jason Durr playing the role of the immortal Poirot. To wit:

A quintessential English country estate is thrown into chaos following the murder of eccentric inventor Sir Claud Amory, and the theft of his new earth-shattering formula. Arriving at the estate just moments too late, one man immediately senses a potent brew of despair, treachery, and deception amid the estate’s occupants. That man is Hercule Poirot.
  In the first play ever written by Agatha Christie we are introduced to a character who went onto become the most famous detective of all time and the only fictional character ever to receive a full-page obituary in the New York Times.

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

Marigolds Are The New Black

I mentioned a couple of months ago that Mel Healy’s debut was ANOTHER CASE IN COWTOWN, a foodie PI tale set in Dublin’s Stoneybatter. PI Moss Reid returns in Mel’s sophmore offering, BLACK MARIGOLDS, with the gist running thusly:

It’s the run-up to Christmas, the city’s streets are full of pub crawlers and Christmas Jumpers, and right-wing TD Ned Power is being blackmailed. He has just been snared in a honeytrap. And if you’re dealing with a honeytrap you might as well start with the honey: a honey as young and sweet as you can get ...
  Stoneybatter’s foodie PI Moss Reid is back with more sad cases, skip traces, tasty recipes and a problem with the brussels sprouts.
  The ‘Moss Reid’ mystery series is mainly set in and around the Stoneybatter district of Dublin. BLACK MARIGOLDS is Irish author Mel Healy’s second novel featuring Moss Reid, the private investigator whose philosophy in life is to “eat, drink and investigate – in that order”.

  For all the info, clickety-click here …

Strangers Things Have Happened

Hearty congrats to Michael Russell, whose THE CITY OF STRANGERS has been shortlisted for the CWA’s Historical Dagger award. Quoth the judges:

Having already brought 1930s Dublin and Danzig vividly to life in his outstanding debut THE CITY OF SHADOWS, Russell does the same for New York in a sequel that’s even better. The unique complexity of Ireland’s divided loyalties and enmities on the eve of the Second World War is explored with unusual clarity and intelligence, and there are plenty of thrills and spills too.

  Very nice indeed. The winner will be announced on June 30th; for all the details, and the full shortlist, clickety-click here …
  For more on THE CITY OF STRANGERS, clickety-click here …

Bristol, Dublin, And On To The Greek Isles …

It’s been a busy few days here at CAP Towers, not least because I wasn’t actually at CAP Towers – I trundled off to Bristol for the weekend, for the annual Crimefest bash, and tremendous fun it was too. Part of the attraction, of course, is that you get to swan about for an entire weekend pretending to be a writer without having to worry about anyone muttering darkly about the emperor’s new clothes, but mainly it’s all about the people, and catching up with some very good sorts you only get to meet once a year. It was also very nice, this year, to be attending the Severn House 40th anniversary celebration, although I did feel a bit of a fraud, given that I’ve only been with Severn House for about six months. Not that you’d have known that, given the warmth of the welcome …
  I also took part in a very enjoyable panel (enjoyable for me, at least) on private eye fiction, alongside Mick Herron, James Carol and Kerry Wilkinson, and curated by the indomitable Donna Moore, who stepped in at the last minute when the original moderator, Ruth Downey, was indisposed. All told, it was a wonderful weekend, and I’m already looking forward to Crimefest 2015 …
  Back to Dublin, then, and the ‘State of Crime’ event at the Central Library, as part of the Dublin Writers Festival last night, where I took my turn hosting Arne Dahl, Sinead Crowley and Brian McGilloway. Lovely people, great writers and a terrific audience made for a very enjoyable evening indeed.
  In the midst of all that, the Publishers Weekly review for my current tome, the comic crime caper CRIME ALWAYS PAYS (Severn House), popped up, which was very nice. The gist runs as follows:

“Burke’s zany sequel to 2007’s The Big O practically requires a scorecard to keep track of the characters [as] a motley crew of misfits leave a trail of chaos and confusion from Ireland to the Greek Isles … Burke keeps adding more characters, making for a profusion of drugs, cops, grifters, guns, and shifting alliances that’s both baffling and entertaining.” – Publishers Weekly

  With which, as you can imagine, I am very pleased indeed.
  Right – back to the grindstone. Normal-ish service will resume tomorrow …

Crime Fiction At The Dublin Writers Festival

I’m very much looking forward to taking part in the Dublin Writers’ Festival this evening, when I’ll be hosting a conversation between Arne Dahl, Sinead Crowley and Brian McGilloway. To wit:

Bestselling Swedish novelist Arne Dahl joins forces with two Irish writers to consider the dark arts of the crime thriller. In such a competitive field, what makes a thriller stand out, and how do you keep the reader turning the pages?
  RTÉ correspondent-turned-crime novelist Sinead Crowley’s debut is attracting all the right buzz. CAN ANYBODY HELP ME? tells the story of a young Dublin mother whose addiction to an online forum leaves her vulnerable to a terrifying killer.
  Brian McGilloway is the New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Inspector Benedict Devlin and DS Lucy Black series. His sixth novel, HURT, was published in 2013. Earlier this year he won the Tony Doyle Award for his screenplay Little Emperors.
  Presented in association with Dublin City Public Libraries.

  The event takes place at the Central Library at 6pm on May 19th. For all the details, including how to book your free tickets, clickety-click here …

Lies Of Silence

Mary O’Donnell’s WHERE THEY LIE (New Island) very likely wasn’t written as a crime / mystery novel – Mary O’Donnell’s reputation is as a literary novelist and poet – but it does offer a fictional account of one of the most compelling investigations in recent Irish history. To wit:

Gerda McAllister’s life is turned upside down when she is contacted by a mysterious caller, who claims to have information about the location of the bodies of her murdered loved ones, who are among the ‘Disappeared’. With her Dubliner boyfriend, and what remains of her family, she begins to piece together the truth. As the picture becomes clearer, though, revelations threaten to come out that will change all of their lives.
  Haunted by the killings, Gerda is forced to decide – will she try to leave the past behind her, or should she try to confront the truth and discover where they lie?
  WHERE THEY LIE is a remarkable novel that explores how families cope with tragedy, how men and women relate, how secrets hold and give power, and how history, when not confronted, can corrupt relationships, love and society. It is a novel of twists and turns that defy easy clarification. It is a novel that demands attention.

  For more information, clickety-click here …

Secrets And Lies

A first glimpse, courtesy of Amazon US, of the cover of Tana French’s forthcoming novel, THE SECRET PLACE (Hachette), which I’ve been looking forward to ever since I finished her last offering, the wonderful BROKEN HARBOUR, which won the LA Times’ Best Mystery / Thriller award. The set-up runs as follows:

The photo on the card shows a boy who was found murdered, a year ago, on the grounds of a girls’ boarding school in the leafy suburbs of Dublin. The caption says ‘I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM’.
  Detective Stephen Moran has been waiting for his chance to get a foot in the door of Dublin’s Murder Squad—and one morning, sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey brings him this photo. “The Secret Place,” a board where the girls at St. Kilda’s School can pin up their secrets anonymously, is normally a mishmash of gossip and covert cruelty, but today someone has used it to reignite the stalled investigation into the murder of handsome, popular Chris Harper. Stephen joins forces with the abrasive Detective Antoinette Conway to find out who and why.
  But everything they discover leads them back to Holly’s close-knit group of friends and their fierce enemies, a rival clique—and to the tangled web of relationships that bound all the girls to Chris Harper. Every step in their direction turns up the pressure. Antoinette Conway is already suspicious of Stephen’s links to the Mackey family. St. Kilda’s will go a long way to keep murder outside their walls. Holly’s father, Detective Frank Mackey, is circling, ready to pounce if any of the new evidence points toward his daughter. And the private underworld of teenage girls can be more mysterious and more dangerous than either of the detectives imagined.
  THE SECRET PLACE is a powerful, haunting exploration of friendship and loyalty, and a gripping addition to the Dublin Murder Squad series.

  THE SECRET PLACE will be published on August 28th …

Here Comes The Sun

Adrian McKinty’s THE SUN IS GOD (Serpent’s Tail) arrived in the post to CAP Towers yesterday, and a handsome tome it is too. McKinty’s most recent offerings, aka the Sean Duffy Trilogy, are set in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, so it’s fair to say that THE SUN IS GOD is something of a departure. Quoth the blurb elves:

Colonial New Guinea—1906: a small group of mostly German nudists live an extreme back-to-nature existence on the remote island of Kabakon. Eating only coconuts and bananas, they purport to worship the sun. One of their members—Max Lutzow—has recently died, allegedly from malaria. But an autopsy on his body in the nearby capital of Herbertshöhe raises suspicions about foul play.
  Retired British military police officer Will Prior is recruited to investigate the circumstances of Lutzow’s death. At first, the eccentric group seems friendly and willing to cooperate with the investigation. They all insist that Lutzow died of malaria. Despite lack of evidence for a murder, Prior is convinced that the group is hiding something …

  THE SUN IS GOD will be published on July 1st. For all the details, clickety-click here …

Review: THE GHOST OF THE MARY CELESTE by Valerie Martin

The Mary Celeste remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of maritime history. Discovered adrift six hundred miles west of Portugal in early December, 1872, the ship was bereft of captain and crew, even though it was still seaworthy and held a six-month supply of food and water in its hold.
  Piracy? Mutiny? Did the crew and a well-respected captain – along with his wife and two-year-old daughter – abandon ship for a lifeboat and subsequently perish? Or were more sinister forces at play?
  American author Valerie Martin opens her tenth novel in 1859, with an account of a shipwreck at sea. The lives lost that day resonate down through the generations, particularly through the Briggs family of Marion, Massachusetts, which has a noble tradition of seafaring. Sarah Cobb picks up the story, telling us, via her journal, about her fears for her younger sister Hannah, who appears to believe that she can channel the spirits of the dead. Sarah Cobb would in due course marry Benjamin Briggs, the captain who was at the helm of the Mary Celeste when it set sail from New York late in 1872.
  Valerie Martin has in the past incorporated historical figures into her fiction, most notably in Mary Reilly (1990), a version of the Jekyll and Hyde story told from the perspective of Mary, a servant in Dr Jekyll’s house. Here she weaves a novel around the lives of the Briggs family, and also includes an investigation into the mystery of the Mary Celeste by Arthur Conan Doyle, who in 1884 published an anonymous account of the mystery titled ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’ (in which he called the ship ‘the Marie Celeste’), which purported to be a survivor’s testimony.
  Meanwhile, a journalist called Phoebe Grant offers a memoir in which she recounts her meetings with Violet Petra, a young woman who is one of the leading lights of Spiritualism, a quasi-religion featuring mediums who can speak with and for the dead, a phenomenon that also fascinates Arthur Conan Doyle on his travels through the United States.
  Even though there is little to suggest that the Mary Celeste fell victim to a supernatural agency, Valerie Martin nails her colours to the mast by including the word ‘ghost’ in her title. This is a novel about faith and doubt, which explores our willingness – with Doyle as a credulous believer, and Grant his sceptic counterpoint – to accept the possibility that there is a world beyond the one we can see, touch and hear. What makes the novel such an engrossing read is that the author is as persuasive when recording Violet Petra’s apparently miraculous powers of divination as she is at constructing a robust rebuttal of any possibility of human interaction with the spirits who reside, according to the Spiritualists, in ‘Summerland’.
  It’s a beautifully written book. Martin has the eye of a poet, particularly when writing about the sea, and some of the stormier passages bring to mind Conrad at his most vivid. Valerie Martin is the daughter of a sea captain, her biography tells us, but she has never been to sea. Nevertheless, the novel is strewn with fabulously detailed images: “Gradually the wind abated, though the sea was still high, kneading the ship like bread dough between the waves.”
  There is much to admire here, not least Martin’s confidence in creating convincing voices for her host of characters, be they historical figures or fictional creations. Moreover, it’s a deliciously readable novel of ideas that challenges readers to question what they truly believe when it comes to the greatest of all the metaphysical concepts, that of the possibility of life after death. ~ Declan Burke

  THE GHOST OF THE MARY CELESTE by Valerie Martin is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

  This review first appeared in the Irish Examiner.

A Dark And Stormy Night

Eoin McNamee’s (right) BLUE IS THE NIGHT (Faber) is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year, and I hugely enjoyed interviewing him when the book appeared. The interview, which appeared in the Irish Examiner, ran a lot like this:

Sitting down to interview Eoin McNamee, you anticipate a serious conversation with a serious man. Born in 1961 and raised in Kilkeel, Co. Down, and now living in Sligo, McNamee is a prize-winning author and a member of Aosdana who has written critically acclaimed novels about historical figures as diverse as the Shankill Butchers and Diana, the former Princess of Wales.
  Yet the man who bandies about notions such as evil, madness and Calvinist pre-determination in the context of the noir novel has a disarming smile that undercuts most of his pronouncements, laughing delightedly at any perceived absurdity that crops up in relation to his latest novel, Blue is the Night, which is as dark a slice of gothic noir as has ever been carved out of Irish history.
  Blue is the Night is the final novel in a loose trilogy that began in 2001 with The Blue Tango (which was longlisted for the Booker Prize) and continued with Orchid Blue in 2010. The trilogy is woven around Sir Lancelot Curran, whose career took him from lawyer to judge and on to Attorney General and Member of Parliament, but Blue is the Night investigates the brutal murder of Curran’s daughter, Patricia, outside their home in Whiteabbey in 1952. It focuses on Lance Curran’s wife, Doris, and his right-hand man and political fixer, Harry Ferguson.
  The book is by no means a straightforward crime fiction investigation, however.
  “I always like to quote Francis Bacon,” says Eoin, “who said that the job of all art is to deepen the mystery. This book is about the mystery of Patricia Curran, and what really happened to her, and by extension the mystery she inherited from her family, her father and her mother.
  “I started out originally, perhaps, to find out who killed Patricia Curran,” he continues, “but the book became about something other than that. It became more about ‘What is mystery?’ What is it that drives these stories, that drives people’s compulsion towards these stories?”
  One possible answer is a fascination with transgression, the idea of flirting with evil itself.
  “I keep coming back, when I talk about this book,” says Eoin, “to what Gordon Burns said about covering the Fred and Rosemary West trial. He said he could never again write the books he’d written before that trial, because he felt the presence of evil in that courtroom. There is an atmosphere of spiritual harm around the Currans, and that’s really what I’m interested in.”
  One strand of Blue is the Night finds Lance Curran prosecuting Robert Taylor, a Protestant man accused of murdering a Catholic woman. If wrong had a human form, observes Ferguson of Taylor. Is McNamee himself arguing for the existence of evil?
  “There was just something about the character of Taylor,” Eoin says, “something of the malicious imp that’s almost outside the human. Then there’s this kind of man-boy persona that he has – at one stage he’s almost like a character out of an Eastern European piece of folklore. An imp, ancient malice personified.”
  References to old European folktales, and the proto-fairytales of Charles Perrault, resurface throughout.
  “It comes up in this book, the idea of the forest, and in the old folktales the forest represents the darkness of the mind and also the concealment of malice, the concealment of evil,” says Eoin. “At one point Patricia Curran talks about the wolves of the forest, the kind of thing you read in East European folktales. And Ferguson talks about his time at Nuremburg, of driving through the trees to get there … Things like that appeal to me. It kind of reminds me of the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer – evil and demons at play.”
  One on level the novel is about the timelessness of evil and how it reappears in different guises in all cultures throughout history. McNamee refers to the ‘ancient malice’ represented by the mummy Takabuti that Ferguson sees in a Belfast museum, and the novel also stretches back in time to late Victorian London, and Jack the Ripper.

  “For every book there’s a little something, a nuance that gets you going,” says Eoin, “and I came across the fact that Doris Curran had been brought up in Broadmoor [when it was known as the Criminal Lunatic Asylum], and also that she had been there at the same time as Thomas Cutbush, the Jack the Ripper suspect. And when I read his admission notes to Broadmoor, they described his hair colour, height, complexion, whatever. And then his eyes: ‘Dark blue, very sharp’. And I thought, ‘That’s it.’ That’s the book right there, Doris and Cutbush and that psychic connection they have.’”
  Another writer might have drawn a straight line between Doris Curran growing up in Broadmoor and the fact that she was committed to Holywell mental institution in 1953, the year after her daughter was stabbed to death.
  “No, it’s not that simple,” says Eoin. “I mean, the implication in the book is that Doris was ‘interfered’ with as a child in some way by Thomas Cutbush, but whether that’s a physical act or a psychic act is not made explicit. But just to be brought into such a commanding presence of evil can be sufficient. Again, it comes back to that word malice – about malice spreading out from a moment.”
  As we talk about the way in which Eoin McNamee writes fiction around historical crimes, the conversation touches upon the trial of Oscar Pistorius in South Africa for the alleged murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, and how much of the public’s interest in the case is prurient.
  “I know,” Eoin agrees, “but I can’t help but be interested in the mind-set of somebody like Pistorius. What kind of rights they imagine they have. What permissions they imagine they have in life.”
  It’s the idea of an elite class allowing themselves certain ‘permissions’ in life that drives ‘the Blue Trilogy’. Lance Curran and Harry Ferguson make for gripping characters precisely because they are self-corrupted.
  “I suppose my own experience of people who are corrupted is that they’re not charmless,” says Eoin with a wry grin. “They’re not unsympathetic, even though they’re corrupt. And that’s what attractive and dangerous about them.”
  In Eoin McNamee’s fiction, even such accomplished rule-breakers as Ferguson and Curran can find themselves at the mercy of Fate.
  “It’s the idea of noir, if you like, being a kind of Calvinist idea of pre-determination – that what happens to you is destined to happen, that there’s a hand on the scales and all you can do is rage against it. The whole essence of the noir ‘hero’ is that you know the universe is stacked against you, and yet you go on and try to defy it. Is that what turns people like Ferguson and Curran? Is that what corrupts them? Because they’re unable to defy Fate?”
  Harry Ferguson is a fictional creation, but the Curran family are historical figures. Is Eoin McNamee entitled to give himself ‘permission’ to use real people’s lives for the purpose of fiction?
  “I did used to worry about the idea of overstepping the moral line,” he says, “but then I decided that I’m not a priest. I don’t have that kind of moral responsibility. But if I have overstepped the line and sinned, then I’ll be answerable to whatever authority you answer to for your sins. If there is one.”

  Blue is the Night by Eoin McNamee is published by Faber & Faber.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

The Heart Is A Lonesome Hunter

I’m hugely looking forward to chatting with Paul Charles at the Gutter Bookshop on Monday evening, May 12th, when I’ll be hosting a Q&A with Paul to mark the publication of his latest novel, THE LONESOME HEART IS ANGRY. Quoth the blurb elves:

What seems like a routine job for matchmaker Michael Gilmour in a small 1960s Northern Irish town becomes something very much more when events take an unexpected turn. The brothers Kane have an idea for their matches that will set tongues wagging, light the fires of jealousy in more than one heart, and open the door to tragedy. THE LONESOME HEART IS ANGRY explores life in a small town and the darker side of the human condition. It doesn’t shy away from the gossip, the fear, the violence and desperation that can build up inside people and behind closed doors. Set in Castlemartin, home of the Playboys who featured in Paul Charles’ THE LAST DANCE, THE LONESOME HEART IS ANGRY is a gripping novel that will keep you reading until the last page.

  The event kicks off at 6.30pm at the Gutter Bookshop, Temple Bar, Dublin. See you there, folks …

When Edgar Met Johnny

It’s (a slightly belated) three cheers, two stools and a resounding ‘Huzzah!’ for John Connolly (right), who took home a prestigious Edgar Award last weekend for his short story, ‘The Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository’. Not too shabby, as they say, not by a long chalk, and CAP Towers was en fete for the weekend after the news filtered through. And while we’re on the subject, John’s current offering, the latest Charlie Parker novel THE WOLF IN WINTER, is a rather fine piece of work too …

  Elsewhere, and staying with the topic of awards, I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville (along with Gene Kerrigan) have been nominated for Barry Awards. Well, it’s a hearty congratulations to both, again, on the news that they’ve been longlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, which will be awarded at the Harrogate Festival in July. Stuart has been nominated for RATLINES, while Adrian’s nomination is for I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET. Both are terrific novels, in my opinion, but the competition is fierce: the longlist also includes Lee Child, Denise Mina, Ian Rankin, Cathi Unsworth and Belinda Bauer, among others. The shortlist will be announced on July 1st, by the way, and there’s a public voting system for narrowing down the longlist: if you’re so inclined, you’ll find all the details here.

Dahl A For Murder

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I will, on the evening of May 19th, be hosting a conversation between Brian McGilloway, Sinead Crowley and Arne Dahl as part of the Dublin Writers’ Festival. It should be a terrific evening, and I’m very much looking forward to it. For all the details, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, Arne Dahl – whose latest novel is TO THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN – will be taking to the stage at Smock Alley on May 18th, when he will take part in a public interview chaired by Brian McGilloway. To wit:

“Arne Dahl combines global intrigue with intelligence, suspense and genuine literary quality.” – Lars Kepler

Chairperson: Brian McGilloway

In recent years Swedish crime drama has swept all before it, and now Arne Dahl has become the latest writer to join the likes of Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell on bestseller lists across the globe. His Intercrime series, about an elite team of detectives investigating the dark underbelly of Swedish society, has sold more than 2.5 million copies worldwide and been made into an award-winning TV series (due to air on TG4 later this year). The English language editions of the first two Intercrime novels were released last year and now Dahl comes to Dublin with the third instalment, TO THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN, which finds the Intercrime team disbanded and their leader forced into early retirement. But when a man is blown up in a high-security prison, and a massacre takes place in a dark suburb, the team is urgently reconvened to face a new and terrifying threat.

Date Sunday 18 May // Time 4pm // Venue Smock Alley Theatre // Tickets €12/ €10 concession

  For all the details, including how to book tickets, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Lisa Alber

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?
This may sound perverse, but I’d love to channel the darkness that burbles around inside Gillian Flynn. She’s wicked! Have you seen photos of her? Looks like she bakes pies for homeless people. Any of her novels will do: SHARP OBJECTS, DARK PLACES, or GONE GIRL.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Fictional characters go through too many hardships and conflicts before their happy endings. I’m too lazy for all that. There’s gotta be a sidekick out there who lives a charmed life and is only around enough to support the hero. That’s more my speed. Anyone got any ideas for me?

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
DA VINCI CODE-type thrillers are my guilty pleasures because I love all that Catholic Church conspiracy stuff. I also like pseudo-scientific symbology stuff that incorporates our greatest myths into the story lines. I just finished a thriller centred around the Amazons. Fun stuff.

Most satisfying writing moment?
The “a-ha.” You know when you’re writing along, maybe it’s not going well, but you’re slapping down the words anyhow (knowing you’ll have a helluva rewrite later), and then somehow, you lose sense of yourself and time and the world around you, and then later you come to and an hour has passed and you can’t remember what you wrote exactly, but you know it’s something grand? Yeah, that. That’s what I love. It’s rare, but the potential is always there. Also, the a-ha moment when you’re writing along and all of a sudden a fantastic idea comes to you out of nowhere -- a plot twist or character revelation -- and you feel so euphoric, the best high ever, that you jump out of your chair and do a little jig that causes your cat to tear out of the room? Yeah, that too.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
I’m still in Irish-crime-novel discovery mode! Some of the obvious recommendations for people like me who aren’t as well-read as they could be are Tana French and Benjamin Black (a.k.a. John Banville) – and you too. Immediate curiosity has me leaning toward checking out Arlene Hunt, Adrian McKinty, Declan Hughes, and Bartholomew Gill (although he’s Irish-American) next.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Benjamin Black’s first mystery, CHRISTINE FALLS, would make a fabulous movie. I picture something stylized, gritty, atmospheric, and filmed in a limited palette (neo-noir Mulholland Drive comes to mind). The way the central mystery about dead Christine slowly circles in on the starring detective’s family baggage is great. Plus, it’s got Catholic Church stuff in it. Like I said above, I can’t get enough of that.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Right now, the worst thing about being a novelist is my need for a day J-O-B. It’s a creative energy sucker, that’s for sure. I struggle to find energy to get the fiction writing in--before work, after work, on weekends. I’m the kind of person who needs long swaths of down time to stay centred and to rejuvenate. The best things are the ‘a-ha’ moments I described above.

The pitch for your next book is ...?
My debut novel, KILMOON, just came out. It’s set in County Clare, the first in a series.

“Family secrets, betrayal, and vengeance from beyond the grave … Merrit Chase is about to meet her long-lost father. Californian Merrit Chase travels to Ireland to meet her father, a celebrated matchmaker, in hopes that she can mend her troubled past. Instead, her arrival triggers a rising tide of violence, and Merrit finds herself both suspect and victim, accomplice and pawn, in a manipulative game that began thirty years previously. When she discovers that the matchmaker’s treacherous past is at the heart of the chaos, she must decide how far she will go to save him from himself—and to get what she wants, a family.”

I’m working on the second novel in the series, for the moment called Grey Man. Things get personal, oh so personal, when a teenage boy dies and disaster hits Detective Sergeant Danny Ahern’s family as a result.

Who are you reading right now?
I’m trying out an author I’ve never read before: James Barney, THE JOSHUA STONE. Another in the realm of guilty pleasures because it features secret government experiments and voodoo science.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I could give up writing if I had to (it’s freaking hard work!), but never reading. Reading goes along with those long swaths of down time I require.

The three best words to describe your own writing are ...?
Atmospheric, multi-layered, and intricate.

KILMOON is Lisa Alber’s debut novel.

Introduction To Crime Writing at the Irish Writers’ Centre

I’m delighted to say that I’ll be hosting a crime writing course at the Irish Writers’ Centre this summer, beginning on May 6th and running for eight weeks. The gist runs like this:

Introduction to Crime Writing with Declan Burke
Police procedural? Private eye? Thriller? Spy novel? The crime novel is the most popular form of fiction in the world and comes in a wide variety of guises. Incorporating international and Irish examples that include contemporary, historical, psychological and comic crime fiction, this course considers the various forms of the crime novel, helping aspiring authors to decide on the best narrative style to employ to tell their story, while also discussing the integral elements of the crime novel: character, plotting, setting, pace, voice and theme. With seven books published in a variety of styles, Declan Burke is an award-winning author of crime fiction and non-fiction.

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

Launch: CAN ANYBODY HELP ME? by Sinead Crowley

Review: THE BOY THAT NEVER WAS by Karen Perry

The latest Irish Times crime fiction column appeared last week, and included the new titles from Martin Cruz Smith, Chris Pavone, Natalie Haynes, Tom Rob Smith and Karen Perry. The Karen Perry review ran a lot like this:

Karen Perry is a new writing partnership composed of Karen Gillece and Paul Perry, and their debut The Boy That Never Was (Penguin / Michael Joseph, €14.99) suggests that it will be the first of many. A prologue set in Tangier in 2005 tells the reader that Harry is guilty of negligence in the death, during an earthquake, of his young son Dillon. The story then moves on to Dublin in 2010, when Harry believes he sees his missing son on O’Connell Street during an anti-government demonstration. Unable to persuade the Gardai that Dillon is alive and well, Harry confesses all to his wife, Robin, which is when we start to realise that Harry has a history of obsession and instability, and that Robin also has secrets she needs to conceal. The unreliable narrator is a staple of the crime / mystery genre, but The Boy That Never Was folds another dimension into the convention by offering us a pair of devious narrators. It’s a neat trick, especially as each succeeding account casts doubt on the truth of the previous offering’s events and the mental state of its narrator, with the result that this assured debut is equal parts thriller, mystery and fascinating psychological study. ~ Declan Burke

  For the rest, clickety-click here …