Publication: DISAPPEARED by Anthony Quinn

Described as ‘One of the best books of the year’ by Strand Magazine when it was published in the US last year, Anthony Quinn’s DISAPPEARED (Head of Zeus) is now available on this side of the pond. To wit:

DISAPPEARED introduces Celcius Daly, a Belfast Police Inspector laden with flawed judgment and misplaced loyalties.
  A retired Special Branch Detective succumbing to early-stage dementia disappears from his remote home in rural Northern Ireland. An ex-intelligence officer is tortured to death. But why was his obituary printed in the local paper before his death? A son seeks his father's long-lost body and vengeance against those who murdered him. A stone-cold killer stalks the outskirts of Belfast. But at whose behest is he hunting his targets? And why?
  All are connected by a single strand spun out of the past... but as Inspector Celcius Daly knows, the past is never dead... it's not even past.

  For more information on Tyrone author Anthony Quinn, clickety-click here …

A Boy And His Bullet

Anthony Quinn, author of DISAPPEARED (Mysterious Press), has a superb essay over at the Mysterious Press blog on his experience of growing up in Northern Ireland at the height of ‘the Troubles’. An excerpt:

“My tenth year was an overwhelming one for me, brought up as a devout Catholic, receiving in my hands something as frightening as a bullet marked for my father, and then something as holy as the consecrated Body of Christ. You would have thought the latter would have negated the former. The good cancelling the bad. The brutal gift of the bullet reversed by the redeeming gift of the Eucharist. However, it didn’t work out like that. One inflamed the other, like throwing raw alcohol on a wound. To this day, I can still feel the imprint of the bullet in my hand.
“The experience left me feeling conflicted in ways that are hard to explain. I became a deeply spiritual teenager with a guilty fascination for IRA violence. I listened obsessively to the daily morning, noon and evening news bulletins, tuning in to the litany of bombings and shootings, which were always delivered by the newsreader in the same monotone voice with which he announced the weather. I was frightened and at the same time thrilled by what I heard, and I wasn’t the only one. Listening to the hourly radio news became a national pastime during the Troubles. Many of my generation were addicted to those little charges of excitement that flow from bad news, swinging from dread to overwhelming relief and satisfaction, and then back to apprehension again, waiting pensively for the day that the news bulletin heralded a personal tragedy. We were the children of the 1970s, and when darkness fell, we brooded on bullets, guns and bombs. The violence terrified us, but, to an extent, it also entertained and diverted us. Many of us became hooked on it.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Thus Spake Mr & Mrs Kirkus …

J. Kingston Pierce compiles his Top Ten Crime / Mystery novels of 2012 over at the Kirkus Reviews blog, and you won’t be even remotely surprised to learn that a certain BROKEN HARBOUR by Tana French shows up. More intriguing, perhaps, is the fact that there’s a second Irish crime novel on the list, and one that seems to have flown under many radars this year: Anthony Quinn’s debut, DISAPPEARED. To wit:

“Quinn enriches DISAPPEARED with Irish history and does an excellent job of ratcheting up the tension as his plot unfolds.” - J. Kingston Pierce

  Very nice indeed. For more on DISAPPEARED, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Anthony Quinn

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?
Anything by Graham Greene, because his shading of good and evil still resonates strongly today. Has there ever been a better writer of noir?

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Patrick Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn - a life spent constructing hayricks and reading poetry in the hedgerows, with a pitchfork to hand for devilment at night.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Social media websites are a terrible distraction when you have writer’s block at the computer. Dickens and Shakespeare were so prolific only because their inkwells weren’t full of friends and followers jostling for their attention.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Successfully forging a doctor’s prescription. No, seriously, when a background character you thought insignificant suddenly takes over a page and then an entire chapter.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I know this is the golden age of Irish crime fiction with authors such as mine host’s ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL redefining the genre itself, but I think the best Irish crime novel is still out there, lurking in the subconscious, waiting to be written …

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Any of Stuart Neville’s thrillers, which read as vivid cinematic treatments of Northern Ireland.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst thing is the daily confrontation with a blank page. Best thing is filling same – even though you might feel like flushing it down the loo the next day.

The pitch for your next book is …?
My historical thriller BLOOD DIMMED TIDE is currently doing the rounds. WB Yeats and his assistant ghost-catcher are summonsed to Sligo by the restless spirit of a girl whose body is mysteriously washed ashore in a coffin from the previous century. They are led on a gripping journey through the ruins of Sligo’s abandoned estates and into its darkest, most haunted corners as the country descends into a bloody war of independence.

Who are you reading right now?
Cormac McCarthy’s early ‘Appalachian noir’.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I’d pick ‘read’ rather than ‘write’, and hope it’s not an Old Testament God, otherwise he’ll condemn me to an eternity of reading my own work as a just punishment for attempting to get it published.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Everything is practice.

Anthony Quinn’s DISAPPEARED is published by the Mysterious Press.

In Like Quinn

Another week, another debut title by an Irish crime writer. This week it’s Anthony Quinn, whose DISAPPEARED is published by Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Press / Open Road Media in July. Quoth the blurb elves:

DISAPPEARED is a poignant and haunting tale of Northern Ireland’s history. Perceiving two mysterious incidents as a sign of something much larger, Inspector Celcius Daly knows an old hatred is resurfacing, and a bloodbath broods ahead. Until now, Emerald Isle experienced its first taste of peace, and it is up to a Catholic detective (in a Protestant land) to restore that peace and solve a murder, digging deep into the garish history of a land stained red with blood.

  ‘Garish history of a land stained red with blood.’ Doesn’t sound very promising, does it? Then again, those blurb elves can’t always be trusted. I read the first few pages of DISAPPEARED on pdf, and they read nowhere as luridly or clunkily as the synopsis above might suggest; in fact, it was all very deftly put together. There’s an ARC on its way to CAP Towers as you read, so I’ll keep you posted …