Event: Louise Phillips’ Crime Writing Course at the Irish Writers’ Centre

A last shout for Louise Phillips’ (right) crime writing course at the Irish Writers’ Centre, which begins on February 5th. To wit:

This course covers many elements of successful crime writing – creating tension, pace, memorable characters, effective dialogue, plot and a gripping page-turning story.
  Over ten weeks, workshop exercises and editorial critique will sharpen your fictional voice. Since commencing workshops, two of Louise’s students have achieved publishing deals and another two are signed with agents.
  If you’re looking to start or finish your crime novel, this course will get you closer to the finish line.
  Louise Phillips is the bestselling author of psychological crime thrillers, Red Ribbons, The Doll’s House (Winner of the Irish Crime Fiction Book of the Year) and Last Kiss.
  Contact the Irish Writers Centre at 19 Parnell Square, Dublin 1.

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

Event: The Guardian Book Club Hosts John Banville on Philip Marlowe

John Banville – aka Benjamin Black, aka Benny Blanco – takes part in a Guardian Book Club discussion on his ‘resurrection’ of Raymond Chandler’s private eye Philip Marlowe in London next Thursday, February 5th. To wit:

“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 . . .”
  John Banville resurrected Raymond Chandler’s private detective, Philip Marlowe, for his 2014 novel The Black-Eyed Blonde. Set in Los Angeles, in the early 1950s, it begins with a visit from a beautiful, elegant heiress, Clare Cavendish, in search of her former lover. All of the essential noir elements are here - a murder, the powerful family with hidden secrets, the sleezy bars and mean streets of LA, and at its centre Chandler’s wisecracking and world-weary sleuth.
  Banville will talk to John Mullan about writing his own Philip Marlowe mystery, the genius of Raymond Chandler and the enduring appeal of one of the most iconic private detectives in crime fiction.

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

Republished: ODD MAN OUT by F.L. Green

Originally published in 1945, F.L. Green’s superb Belfast-set thriller ODD MAN OUT will soon be republished by Valancourt Books, with an introduction from Adrian McKinty. To wit:

An Irish Republican Army plot goes horribly wrong when its leader, Johnny Murtah, kills an innocent man and is himself gravely wounded. As the police close in on Johnny, his compatriots must make a daring bid to rescue him. But they are not the only ones in pursuit: an impoverished artist, a saintly priest, a sleazy informer, and a beautiful young woman all have their own reasons to be desperate to find him. Meanwhile Johnny wanders the streets injured and alone, trapped in a delirious nightmare, surrounded on all sides by betrayal and faced with the realization that he may die that night with the stain of murder on his soul. The action unfolds over eight hours of a cold Belfast night, with the suspense building towards an explosive conclusion.
  Both a critical success and a bestseller, F. L. Green’s masterful thriller Odd Man Out (1945) is best known today as the basis for the classic 1947 film adaptation directed by Carol Reed and starring James Mason. This edition, the first in over 30 years, features a new introduction by Adrian McKinty.

  As it happens, Adrian McKinty’s contribution to DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS (2011), which focused on Northern Ireland’s early contribution to Irish crime writing, was titled ‘Odd Men Out’, in which he touches briefly on ODD MAN OUT, describing it as a Dante-esque descent into a surrealist hell. Poor old Belfast, eh? Always the bitter word, etc. ...

One to Watch: THE NIGHT GAME by Frank Golden

Poet, painter and filmmaker Frank Golden adds yet another string to his rather impressive bow with the forthcoming publication of his psychological thriller THE NIGHT GAME (Salmon Poetry). To wit:

In her late thirties Mary lives in her childhood home - a rambling brownstone on New York’s Lower East Side. Returning from work Mary’s thoughts are on a therapy session from earlier that day, and on the group meeting she will attend later in the week. One of the other members of the group is Vincent, with whom she has had a transgressive sexual history. Mary, un-nerved by a series of threatening phone calls and what she believes is evidence of a stalker, makes contact with Sarah, one of her oldest friends. Sarah offers to move in with Mary until the situation is resolved. When Vincent moves in as well things complicate and degrade. Unnervingly dark, THE NIGHT GAME offers up psychological intrigue and emotional depth that make it a compelling read.

  THE NIGHT GAME will be published on May 28th, although Frank will launch the book at the Ennis Book Club Festival on March 6th.

Publication: THE WATCHED by Casey Hill

THE WATCHED (Simon & Schuster) is the fourth novel from wife-and-husband writing team Casey Hill to feature forensic investigator Reilly Steel. While the previous novels have been set in Ireland, Reilly returns home to the US for THE WATCHED. Quoth the blurb elves:

Quantico-trained forensic investigator Reilly Steel is back in the country of her birth. Unsure about both her future and her position within the Dublin police force, Reilly hopes that a relaxing stay at the Florida beach home of her old FBI mentor Daniel Forrest will help get her thoughts together. When Daniel’s son, policeman Todd Forrest, is called to the scene of a gruesome murder where the body of a beautiful woman has literally been torn in two, he is stopped in his tracks. Not just because of the grotesque and theatrical nature of the crime but because he recognizes the victim as Daniel’s goddaughter. In an attempt to find swift resolution on her old friend’s behalf, Reilly finds herself drawn into the investigation. And when another disturbing murder occurs soon after, Reilly can’t help but feel that she has come across something like this before. But where? The answer becomes apparent at a third crime scene - the killer is visually re-enacting some of the most famous murder scenes in screen history and posting his ‘work’ online for his followers and the whole world to see. Will the investigative team be able to find the murderer before his thirst for ‘screen immortality’ drives him to kill again? And will Reilly’s brief hiatus in the US force her into a decision about her future in Dublin, and the unfinished business she has there?

  For more on Casey Hill, clickety-click here …

Publication: GHOST FLIGHT by Mel Healy

GHOST FLIGHT is the latest offering in Mel Healy’s Moss Reid series, which concerns itself with “a gastronomic private eye whose main patch is around the Stoneybatter and Smithfield districts of Dublin.” To wit:

2008: The Irish economy is about to go belly up, and three Irish businessmen disappear in a light aircraft off the west coast of Ireland. There is no mayday message. No wreckage, no bodies, nothing.
  Six years later, Niamh McElhinney bumps into one of the missing men in the south of France. Then she, too, goes missing. Time to call Wilde & Reid Investigations …
  Stoneybatter private eye Moss Reid is back, in his most complicated case to date, as a slow journey down the Canal du Midi turns into a nightmare race to find a faceless killer.
  GHOST FLIGHT is the third in Irish writer Mel Healy’s series involving Moss Reid, the Dublin PI whose priorities in life are to “eat, drink and investigate – in that order”.

  For more on Mel Healy and Moss Reid, clickety-click here …

One to Watch: ONLY WE KNOW by Karen Perry

The writing partnership Karen Perry (right) hit the ground running last year with a terrific debut psychological thriller, THE BOY THAT NEVER WAS, so I’m very much looking forward to seeing what they do with their follow-up offering, ONLY WE KNOW (Penguin). Quoth the blurb elves:

Kenya, 1982. The relentless sun beats down on the Maasai Mara. Three children, Nick, Luke and Katie, bored and hot, go down to the river alone. But when their innocent game by the banks of the river goes horribly wrong, their lives are changed forever and they are eternally bound by a shocking and suffocating secret.
  Dublin, 2013. Their secret is buried, but not forgotten, and when Luke goes missing in violent circumstances it becomes clear that their childhood mistakes have come back to haunt them . . .

  ONLY WE KNOW will be published on June 4.

News: Stuart Neville and Jane Casey Shortlisted for Edgar Awards

It’s a hearty CAP Towers congratulations to Stuart Neville and Jane Casey, both of whom were nominated for Edgar awards when the shortlists were announced early today, January 21st. Stuart’s THE FINAL SILENCE was nominated in the Best Novel category, while Jane’s THE STRANGER YOU KNOW was nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award. To wit:

Best Novel
This Dark Road to Mercy by Wiley Cash (HarperCollins Publishers – William Morrow)
Wolf by Mo Hayder (Grove/Atlantic – Atlantic Monthly Press)
Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King (Simon & Schuster – Scribner)
The Final Silence by Stuart Neville (Soho Press)
Saints of the Shadow Bible by Ian Rankin (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown)
Coptown by Karin Slaughter (Penguin Randomhouse – Delacorte Press)

Mary Higgins Clark
A Dark and Twisted Tide by Sharon Bolton (Minotaur Books)
The Stranger You Know by Jane Casey (Minotaur Books)
Invisible City by Julia Dahl (Minotaur Books)
Summer of the Dead by Julia Keller (Minotaur Books)
The Black Hour by Lori Rader-Day (Prometheus Books – Seventh Street Books)

  For the full run-down of all Edgar categories and nominees, clickety-click here …

Local Heroes: Philip Davison

We’re all familiar with the huge strides taken by Irish crime fiction over the past decade or so, but there were quite a few Irish authors writing crime / mystery / thriller novels before it was fashionable and / or (koff) profitable.
  Philip Davison (author, playwright and screenwriter, and currently a member of Aosdána) is one of them, possibly overlooked in terms of his contribution to Irish crime writing because the hero of his four spy novels, Harry Fielding, was an ‘understrapper’ for MI5.
  Davison published four novels with Fielding as his protagonist: THE CROOKED MAN (1997), MCKENZIE’S FRIEND (2000), THE LONG SUIT (2003) and A BURNABLE TOWN (2006). The reviews, such as those below for MCKENZIE’S FRIEND, were rather impressive:

“Chilly, elegant and disconcertingly comic. Rather like a collaboration between two notable Green(e)s – Graham and Henry – and quite safely described as original.” ~ Literary Review

“Davison shares Beckett’s knack for making the down-at-the-heel appear surreal.” ~ Times Literary Supplement

  THE LONG SUIT, meanwhile, was compared with John le Carré, Len Deighton and that man Graham Greene again. You get the picture: we’re in the realm of the literary spy thriller. THE LONG SUIT opens thusly:

“I had my own troubles, some of which I had addressed. When they lifted me my plan had been to go to ground, let time pass and be vigilant. Like a Druid, I had come to count nights instead of days. I watched Clements talking to somebody at the end of the corridor. He was loud, but I couldn’t make out the words. The lower jaw seemed to have just the one spring action. He was like a thirsty dog drinking from a water pistol …”

  For more on Philip Davison, clickety-click here …

UPDATE: Mel Healy has a very nice appraisal of Philip Davison’s style (along with a tangent or two about his food consumption) over here …

One To Watch: THE DEFENCE by Steve Cavanagh

Steve Cavanagh’s ‘The Grey’ is one of the most impressive of the offerings in BELFAST NOIR, the new short story collection edited by Stuart Neville and Adrian McKinty, and it augurs well for THE DEFENCE (Orion), Steve’s debut novel, which will be published next March. Quoth the blurb elves:

The truth has no place in a courtroom. The truth doesn’t matter in a trial. The only thing that matters is what the prosecution can prove. Eddie Flynn used to be a con artist. Then he became a lawyer. Turned out the two weren’t that different. It’s been over a year since Eddie vowed never to set foot in a courtroom again. But now he doesn’t have a choice. Olek Volchek, the infamous head of the Russian mafia in New York, has strapped a bomb to Eddie's back and kidnapped his ten-year-old daughter Amy. Eddie only has 48 hours to defend Volchek in an impossible murder trial - and win - if wants to save his daughter. Under the scrutiny of the media and the FBI, Eddie must use his razor-sharp wit and every con-artist trick in the book to defend his ‘client’ and ensure Amy's safety. With the timer on his back ticking away, can Eddie convince the jury of the impossible? Lose this case and he loses everything.

  For more on Steve Cavanagh, clickety-click here …

One to Watch: JOHN LE CARRE: THE BIOGRAPHY by Adam Sisman

It won’t be published until October, unfortunately, but I’m very much looking forward to Adam Sisman’s biography of John le Carré, which will be published by Bloomsbury. To wit:

John le Carré is still at the top, more than half a century after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold became a worldwide bestseller. From his bleak childhood - the departure of his mother when he was five was followed by ‘sixteen hugless years’ in the dubious care of his father, a serial-seducer and con-man - through recruitment by both MI5 and MI6, to his emergence as the master of the espionage novel, le Carré has repeatedly quarried his life for his fiction. Millions of readers are hungry to know the truth about him. Written with exclusive access to le Carré himself, to his private archive and to many of the people closest to him, this is a major biography of one of the most important novelists alive today.

  I like the idea of the book promoting le Carré as ‘one of the most important novelists alive today’. All too often, when talking about le Carré, you hear that he’s a wonderful spy novelist, very likely the best of his kind and the man who spun literature from the Cold War conflict, but that the quality of his books has suffered in the Brave New post-Wall World. Stuff and nonsense, of course. As much as I love the Cold War novels, they were set during a period that to a large extent (and understandably so) characterised by a black-and-white, us-vs-them perspective. The latter work is far more fascinating, I think, ‘rooted’ as they are in the fertile but shifting sands of fluid conflicts, unlikely alliances and moral relativism.
  As for the idea that le Carré is a great spy novelist: he is, of course, but leaving at that is equivalent to saying that James Joyce was a dab hand at writing about Dublin, or METAMORPHOSIS is the finest possible example of a novel about bugs.
  As it happens, I’ve been on a bit of a le Carré binge this January: so far I’ve read OUR GAME, CALL FOR THE DEAD and SINGLE AND SINGLE. CALL FOR THE DEAD (1961) is a little out of place, of course, given that proceeds as far more a traditional investigation than le Carré would offer in later years (poignant to realise that the first character ever introduced in a le Carré novel, even before George Smiley puts in an appearance, is the perennially elusive Lady Ann Sercomb), but OUR GAME (1995) and SINGLE AND SINGLE (1999) both offer characters who are singularly and even self-destructively obsessed with achieving one good thing in a breathtakingly bleak and cynical world, despite their own awareness of how Pyrrhic their achievement might be. If fiction has more or better to offer than that particular kind of story, I really don’t know what it is. It helps, of course, that when it comes to the idea that character is mystery (to paraphrase John Connolly), le Carré delivers more value per line than any other writer I know.
  Here endeth my two cents. JOHN LE CARRE: THE BIOGRAPHY by Adam Sisman is published on October 22nd.

One To Watch: FREEDOM’S CHILD by Jax Miller

American-born, Irish-based, Jax Miller (aka Áine Ó Domhnaill) publishes her debut thriller, FREEDOM’S CHILD (Crown), later this year – although it’s fair to say that Jax / Áine has already had a rather storied publishing history. Quoth the blurb elves:

Freedom Oliver has plenty of secrets. She lives in a small Oregon town where no one knows much about her. They know she works at the local biker bar; they know she gets arrested for public drunkenness almost every night; they know she’s brash, funny, and fearless.
  What they don’t know is that Freedom Oliver is a fake name. They don’t know that she was arrested for killing her husband, a cop, twenty years ago. They don’t know she put her two kids up for adoption. They don’t know that she’s now in witness protection, regretting ever making a deal with the feds, missing her children with a heartache so strong it makes her ill.
  Her troubled past comes roaring back to her when she learns that her daughter—whom she only knew for two minutes, seventeen seconds before they took her away—has gone missing, possibly kidnapped. Freedom gets on a motorcycle, and heads for Kentucky, where her daughter was raised. No longer protected by the government, she is targeted and tracked by her husband’s sadistic family, who are eager to make Freedom pay for his death.
  Written with a ferocious wit and a breakneck pace, FREEDOM’S CHILD is about a woman who risks everything to make amends for a past that haunts her still.

  FREEDOM’S CHILD is published in June.

News: Irish Crime Fiction at Trinity College

There’s a fascinating course on Irish crime fiction being taught in Trinity College these days, under the aegis of Professor Chris Morash and Dr Brian Cliff, titled – with breathtaking simplicity – ‘Irish Crime Fiction’. To wit:

“‘The detective novel’, wrote Walter Benjamin, ‘has become an instrument of social criticism’. This new co-taught seminar will explore perhaps the fastest-growing area of contemporary Irish literature, the Irish crime novel, considering its roots, its emphasis on crisis and change in a society, and its ability to distil and magnify a society’s obsessions. For these reasons, studies of Irish crime fiction are on the cusp of becoming a key strand in the study of contemporary Irish culture, here and abroad.”

  Authors under scrutiny include John Connolly, Declan Hughes, Tana French, Arlene Hunt, Benjamin Black, Eoin McNamee and Stuart Neville, with DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS playing its humble part as one of the establishing texts.
  For more, clickety-click here …

Publication: TAKEN FOR DEAD by Graham Masterton

Graham Masterton’s popular series featuring Cork-based garda detective Katie Maguire goes from strength to strength. The fourth in the series, TAKEN FOR DEAD (Head of Zeus), will be published on February 12th:

It is a sunny Saturday in county Cork, and an Irish wedding is in full swing. Drunk uncles are toasting the bride. The Ceilidh band have played for hours. But the cutting of the cake will bring the wedding to a horrifying end. For there, grinning gruesomely up from the bottom tier, is the severed head of the local baker. Katie Maguire, of the Irish Garda, does not have any leads - until another local businessman goes missing in horrific circumstances. The murders appear to link to The Kings of Erin, a terrifying gang of torturers and extortionists. But these are dangerous men. And they will stop at nothing to throw Katie off the trail ...

  For more on the Katie Maguire novels, clickety-click here …