Black In The Pink

The New York Times has a bit of a jones for Irish crime scribes these days. Yesterday I mentioned Marilyn Stasio’s review of Conor Fitzgerald’s THE FATAL TOUCH; not to be outdone, Janet Maslin weighed in with a fine appreciation of Benjamin Black’s latest, A DEATH IN SUMMER. The gist runs thusly:

“Benjamin Black, whose fourth book is A DEATH IN SUMMER, started out as the escapist alter ego of John Banville, who won the Man Booker Prize for his 2005 novel THE SEA. But his Black persona has been such a success that he looks increasingly like the Superman to Mr. Banville’s more literary Clark Kent. His books about the dour Irish pathologist named Quirke have effortless flair, with their period-piece cinematic ambience and their sultry romance. The Black books are much more like Alan Furst’s elegant, doom-infused World War II spy books than like standard crime tales.” - Janet Maslin

  Mind you, Ms Maslin does report that Mr Black does succumb “to the occasional fit of verbosity. At one atypically overripe moment the author manages to use “miasmic,” “ether,” “teeming,” “bacilli,” “succumb,” “writhe” and “tender torment” in the same sentence.”
  I have to say that I didn’t notice that particular sentence when I read A DEATH IN SUMMER, which I enjoyed very much, not least because there’s a palpable sense of John Banville settling into the Benjamin Black persona and - whispers, now - actually enjoying it. For my take on the novel, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, Eithne Shortall in the Sunday Times (no link) brought us the news that the Benjamin Black novels are to be made into a TV series for the BBC, to be filmed in Dublin by Tyrone Productions and Element Pictures. To wit:

Banville … set out to create a detective series for television, and when the project was shelved he converted it into a novel. Nine years later it is about to complete a roundabout journey to the screen. […] Each of the first three Black books will be turned into a 90-minute drama, and if they prove successful the fourth instalment will also be adapted.

  So that’s Black in the pink, and Banville in the black. Nice.

Emerald Noir: Val McDermid Speaks

The doyenne of British crime fiction, Val McDermid (right), turns her steely gaze on the Irish crime novel next Tuesday, March 8th, in a BBC radio programme entitled ‘Emerald Noir: The Rise of Irish Crime Fiction’. Quoth the BBC blurb elves:

Peace in Northern Ireland and the economic boom and bust in Southern Ireland have led to a recent rise in crime fiction.
  Val McDermid looks at the way real life violence has been dealt with in the work of authors including Tana French, Eoin McNamee, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Stuart Neville and Declan Hughes. We meet David Torrans - whose bookstore in Belfast has been fictionalised in Colin Bateman’s series of crime novels. Declan Burke - author of the blog Crime Always Pays - takes us on a tour of Dublin locations featured in crime novels from the modern Docklands offices which inspired Alan Glynn’s novel Winterland to the hotels and shops of 1950s Dublin featured in the crime fiction of Booker winner John Banville - who writes under the name Benjamin Black.
  Val asks whether the Noir novel is a protestant art form and hears how writers are trying to find new villains in a place where violence has - until recently - been part of everyday life.
  Producer: Robyn Read.
  Tuesday, 11:30 on BBC Radio 4

  Nice. It’s entirely serendipitous that the programme airs in advance of the publication next month of DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS: IRISH CRIME WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY, edited by one Declan Burke (Liberties Press), a collection of essays, interviews and short stories by Irish crime writers which includes all the names mentioned above, and also John Connolly, Ken Bruen, Arlene Hunt, Alex Barclay, Adrian McKinty, Gene Kerrigan, Jane Casey, and many more. GREEN STREETS will be published next month, and will be the subject of a New York University symposium on the rise of the Irish crime novel at the end of April, more of which anon.
  Finally, for the day that’s in it, here’s a rather fine review by David Park in the Irish Times of Adrian McKinty’s new offering, FALLING GLASS. The gist runs thusly:

McKinty is a streetwise, energetic gunslinger of a writer, firing off volleys of sassy dialogue and explosive action that always delivers what it has promised the reader. The story is skilfully constructed, and the pace is always full throttle forwards. There is one violent scene in Mexico involving a chainsaw that is definitely not for the squeamish, but it would be unfair to think of the author as someone exclusively reliant on external action. There is, for example, an interesting psychological exploration of Killian’s re-embracing of his half-forgotten roots and the cultural values of the Traveller community. Even the dark figure of Markov, the Russian hitman, gets layered and lightened with some psychological subtleties that are the product of his relationship with his partner, Marina, and experiences of the war in Chechnya that continue to haunt him.

  For the full review, clickety-click here …

He’ll Be Having A Go At The Lilies Next

It’s not often we find cause to be envious of The Artist Formerly Known As Bateman (right). Handsome, successful and well-adjusted, we have no need of his talent, fame and chiselled, windswept features. But every once in a while even TAFKAB does something that takes our breath away. This week: TAFKAB tells the BBC to do one. Quoth the Belfast Telegraph:

Award-winning author Colin Bateman has launched an expletive-fuelled tirade against politically-correct BBC chiefs for carrying out a “witch-hunt” against him.
  In a bizarre episode, which could be straight off the pages of one of the Ulsterman’s own comic novels, the Beeb blasted Bateman for being offensive to albinos.
  Now Bangor-born Bateman — the creator of the hit Belfast telly detective show Murphy’s Law — has responded by telling them to, “Get a f****** life!”

  TAFKAB’s crime, apparently, is that Mo, one of the characters from his YA series, has albinism, and that other characters in the novel remark upon her unusual pigmentation.
  As gritty realism goes, it’s not quite The Wire. It does, however, reflect the real world.
  Now, Mo isn’t some token background character. She’s the hero. She does hero stuff. She’s a powerful role model. She doesn’t use her albinism as some kind of super-power, but neither does she allow her condition to prevent her from doing all the kinds of things people who don’t have albinism do, and then some.
  So why the witch-hunt?
  A quiet day at the news desk? Lazy journalism? Political correctness run amok? All three combined?
  And where does it all end? At what point do we censor Shakespeare for his depiction of Jews in The Merchant of Venice? Or get all tabloid on his ass for depicting Richard III with a hump? Or suggesting that it’s even remotely cool for a 14-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl to elope, and then commit suicide?
  Or, as the venerable TAFKAB says: “If a bank robber is an Apache, I want to be able to say he’s an Apache without getting a tomahawk in the brain from the f****** political correctness police.”
  Amen, brother.