“There Was A Young Man Called Bill Ryan …”

William Ryan, the author of the Captain Korolev series of novels, will be leading a creative writing workshop in the Limerick Writers’ Centre on May 25th. Not a workshop on how to write limericks, you understand – the emphasis will be on developing characters for fiction, and the workshop will cost you the princely sum of five euros. Sounds like a bargain to me.
  If I’m not very much mistaken, as I very often am, the workshop will coincide with the Limerick launch of William Ryan’s latest tome, THE TWELFTH DEPARTMENT (Mantle), which is published on May 23rd. Quoth the blurb elves:

Moscow, 1937. Captain Korolev, a police investigator, is enjoying a long-overdue visit from his young son Yuri when an eminent scientist is shot dead within sight of the Kremlin and Korolev is ordered to find the killer. It soon emerges that the victim, a man who it appears would stop at nothing to fulfil his ambitions, was engaged in research of great interest to those at the very top ranks of Soviet power. When another scientist is brutally murdered, and evidence of the professors’ dark experiments is hastily removed, Korolev begins to realise that, along with having a difficult case to solve, he’s caught in a dangerous battle between two warring factions of the NKVD. And then his son Yuri goes missing . . . A desperate race against time, set against a city gripped by Stalin’s Great Terror and teeming with spies, street children and Thieves, THE TWELFTH DEPARTMENT confirms William Ryan as one of the most compelling historical crime novelists at work today.

  Meanwhile, William Ryan and I had a very enjoyable conversation on the business of writing in the last couple of weeks, the result of which has been posted at Shotsmag and the Mystery Tribune. To wit:

“There’s a bigger issue at play here too, and it taps into your question about ‘being Irish’. I was born and raised in Sligo in the Northwest of Ireland, but my cultural experiences growing up were American movies and books, British books and music, and football, European movies, Dutch beer … all these things, and more, were as important in forming my appreciation of culture as any and all of the Irish elements. And if I’m going to write, and be true to my experience of what brought me to the point where I want to write, then I’d be a hypocrite not to include, or at least acknowledge, those influences. That’s why EIGHTBALL BOOGIE (and to a lesser extent its sequel, SLAUGHTER’S HOUND) is so heavily influenced by Raymond Chandler in particular, and the American hardboiled novel in general. Why THE BIG O is influenced by Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen and Barry Gifford.
  “I don’t know, maybe it has something to do with living in a post-colonial country. Ireland has been overlaid with any number of cultures over the past thousand years, and more. And then there’s the fact that emigration has played such an important part in Irish history, and that emigrants bring back all these cultural artefacts and incorporate them into the mix. Do we even know what ‘being Irish’ means?”

  For the rest, clickety-click on Shotsmag or Mystery Tribune.

It All Goes Better With An E: THE BIG O Goes Digital

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed the arrival of a new book in the right-hand column of Crime Always Pays – or a new book cover, to be precise. For lo! A mere six years after it first appeared in print, THE BIG O is finally available as an e-book (at $4.99 / £4.99 / €4.99).
  First published by the marvellous Marsha Swan of Hag’s Head Press back in 2007 (actually, I co-published the book with Marsha, on a 50/50 costs-and-profits arrangement, and great fun it all was too), and subsequently published by HMH in the US, THE BIG O for some reason never made it into digital.
  Shortly after HMH picked it up, the editor (the wonderful Stacia Decker) who signed me moved on to pastures new with the Donald Maass Literary Agency, and THE BIG O – beautifully published in hardback though it was – became something of an orphan (pauses to sniffle, chokes back a sob).
  Anyway, I bought back the rights late last year because I’m particularly fond of the story, which is a black comedy about a kidnap-gone-wrong, and I hated the idea of it languishing in a kind of publishing limbo. It’s also true that its sequel, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS, was also stuck in said limbo, and while I did go ahead an e-publish CRIME ALWAYS PAYS, there wasn’t a huge appetite out there for the sequel to a book that wasn’t readily available.
  I’ve always felt that that was a pity, because the book did receive some very nice reviews. A sample looks like this:

“Imagine Donald Westlake and his alter ego Richard Stark moving to Ireland and collaborating on a screwball noir and you have some idea of Burke’s accomplishment.” – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Burke has married hard-boiled crime with noir sensibility and seasoned it with humour and crackling dialogue … fans of comic noir will find plenty to enjoy here.” – Booklist

“Carries on the tradition of Irish noir with its Elmore Leonard-like style ... the dialogue is as slick as an ice run, the plot is nicely intricate, and the character drawing is spot on … a high-octane novel that fairly coruscates with tension.” – Irish Times

“Burke has [George V.] Higgins’ gift for dialogue, [Barry] Gifford’s concision and the effortless cool of Elmore Leonard at his peak. In short, THE BIG O is an essential crime novel of 2007, and one of the best of any year.” – Ray Banks

“THE BIG O is a big ol’ success, a tale fuelled by the mischievous spirits of Donald E. Westlake, Elmore Leonard and even Carl Hiaasen … THE BIG O kept me reading at speed – and laughing the whole damn time.” – J. Kingston Pierce, January Magazine

  So there you have it. As you might imagine, I’m very keen to spread the word about the e-availability of THE BIG O, so if the spirit so moves you, I’d be very grateful for any mention you could give it on your blog or Twitter account, or Facebook, or to your friends by quill and ink … Oh, and the Amazon page looks rather bare, so if you’ve read THE BIG O, and have the time to post a quick review, I’d be very grateful indeed.
  Meanwhile, if there’s anyone out there who’d like to receive a review copy of THE BIG O, just drop me a line at dbrodb[at]gmail.com.
  Thanks kindly for reading, folks. I really do appreciate your time.

He Who Laughs Last Laughs Lastiest

You get good weeks and you get bad weeks and I guess this is one of the good weeks. Yesterday I heard that ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL has been shortlisted for the ‘Goldsboro Last Laugh Award’, which will be conferred at Crimefest in Bristol for ‘the best humorous crime novel first published in the British Isles in 2011’.
  And that list of nominees in full:

- Declan Burke for Absolute Zero Cool (Liberties Press)
- Colin Cotterill for Killed at the Whim of a Hat (Quercus)
- Chris Ewan for The Good Thief's Guide to Venice (Simon & Schuster)
- Christopher Fowler for Bryant & May and the Memory of Blood (Doubleday)
- Carl Hiaasen for Star Island (Sphere)
- Doug Johnstone for Smokeheads (Faber and Faber)
- Elmore Leonard for Djibouti (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
- L.C. Tyler for Herring on the Nile (Macmillan)

  It’s obligatory - but no less accurate for all that - to point out that I haven’t a hope of winning given the stellar quality of the shortlist, but seriously, it really is very nice just to be mentioned in the same company.
  I was shortlisted for the ‘Last Laugh Award’ before, actually, back in 2008, when Ruth Dudley Edwards won it with MURDERING AMERICANS. The book was THE BIG O, which was deliberately conceived as a homage to some of my favourite crime writers, Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen and Barry Gifford. And here we are, four years later, having written an entirely different kind of comic novel to THE BIG O, and staring down the twin barrels of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen …
  So there you have it. There’s been more good news this week, and it’s actually better news than the ‘Last Laugh’ nomination, but today I’m strapped for time because I’m in the middle of proofing a collection of essays that I think will blow your socks off, and I better crack on. Have a great weekend, everyone …

My Top Ten Crime Novels: Declan Burke

It’s not a book I hear mentioned a lot these days, but Alistair MacLean’s WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL is one of my favourite crime thrillers, and one I tend to indulge myself with a re-read every couple of years. Yes, I know MacLean isn’t exactly hip anymore, but, well, hip schmip. It’s a very neat piece of Bond pastiche / parody / homage, with the added bonus - by Ian Fleming’s standards, at least - of being unusually realistic for a thriller, and the setting of the west coast of Scotland is hugely atmospheric, possibly because it’s always raining.
  I first read WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL in my mid-teens, and it was hugely influential on me. I particularly liked the deadpan stoicism and ever-so-slightly knowing first-person narration delivered by the ‘hero’, the put-upon but resourceful spook Calvert. When my first novel appeared, people were generous enough to favourably mention the blatant Chandleresque rip-off, and some even mentioned John D. MacDonald and Jim Thompson (the latter due to the epigraph I used, probably), but even moreso than Chandler, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE was heavily influenced by Colin Bateman’s DIVORCING JACK and Alistair MacLean’s WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL - hence the ‘EIGHT’ in EIGHTBALL BOOGIE. To wit:

WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL by Alistair MacLean
I’m not normally a fan of thrillers, but when I read this at a young age it seemed to me a low-fi James Bond novel, and all the more enjoyable for it. In fact, it’s Bond laced with Chandlerisms, set in a superbly drawn Scottish landscape of islands, crags, inlets and castles, and combines the page-turning quality of the high-concept thriller with a grittily realistic spy tale reminiscent of Le Carré.

  Anyway, the reason I mention WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL is that the good people at Book Aware asked me to contribute my Top Ten Crime Novels to their list, as flagged earlier this week by Ken Bruen’s Top Ten Crime Novels. For the full list of my own Top Ten, which includes James Ellroy, Adrian McKinty, John McFetridge, Jim Thompson, The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman and Barry Gifford, clickety-click on Book Aware here …
  Book Aware is hosting a series of such lists, with the aim of supporting Sightsavers, which has the vision of ‘a world where no one is blind from avoidable causes and where visually impaired people participate equally in society. Help Sightsavers help people enjoy the world of books too.’ Any writers wishing to help out Book Aware and Sightsavers by contributing their own Top Ten Favourite Novels should contact Neil at neil(at)galwayprint.ie.

Laugh? I Nearly Emigrated

Colin Bateman (right) was kind enough to give me a very generous plug last week, in a piece he wrote for the Guardian’s Book Blog, in which he claimed that comic crime fiction is a ‘new and challenging’ way of dealing with what can often be moribund clichés in the crime writing genre. Peter Rozovsky picked up the ball and ran with it over at Detectives Beyond Borders, where the conversation became a debate about the use and abuse of gratuitous violence in crime novels, and particularly against women.
  There’s no doubt that employing comedy in crime fiction is a high-wire act. Crime is a very serious business, in more ways than one; violence, rape, torture and murder are not matters to be taken lightly. My big problem, as a writer, is that I love the crime novel form, and that I find it very difficult to write without trying to be funny. I have tried to write stories that are serious in tone, but I get bored very quickly, and find myself repressing the instinct to poke fun at the foibles of the characters, their ambitions and hubris. That puts me in an awkward position, not least because a good friend of mine died violently many years ago, and it goes against the grain to underplay the consequences of violence of any kind.
  My first novel, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, was an attempt to write an homage-of-sorts to the novels of Raymond Chandler - in other words, the novel was serious in its intent, but its protagonist, Harry Rigby, was prone to comic quips and asides to the reader. As best as I can remember without rereading it, the story contains two murders, both of which, I hope, receive their full due in terms of their consequences. The story also contains occasional outbreaks of non-lethal violence, most of which is perpetrated against Rigby, and again, I tried to do justice to the reality of my own experience of physical violence - that it is brutal and nasty, and as psychologically unsettling as it is physically debilitating. That said, Rigby at one point ships a bullet in his gut and - after a brief period of recuperation - goes merrily on his way. Plausible? Definitely not, according to a number of reviewers. By the same token, none of the violence is gratuitous, nor is it excessively detailed or gruesome.
  By the time I came to write my second novel, THE BIG O, I was a little worn out by the forensically detailed emphasis on violence and murder in the novels I was reading, and particularly burnt out by those authors who were gleefully celebrating the extent to which their novels were plumbing the depths of human depravity. The form I decided on was a homage-of-sorts to Elmore Leonard, with a nod to Barry Gifford, but I also set myself the challenge of writing a crime novel that contained no murders at all, and the bare minimum of violence. Apart from self-inflicted harm, the novel contains two actual episodes of violence: a dog has its eye removed with a fork, and a man - one of the bad guys - gets shot in the knee. By the standards of the kill-count in the crime novel today, that’s positively quaint.
  The comedy aspect was a bit more challenging. Many reviewers commented on the number of coincidences in the novel: some were willing to play along with the conceit, others found it a bit wearying. My intent, for what it’s worth, was to write a comic crime novel according to the classical definition of comedy - i.e., in classical Greek drama, tragedy is considered to be undeveloped comedy. In the context of the novel, a group of characters scheme and plot towards the finale, growing increasingly desperate to achieve their aims even as fate - in the form of those coincidences - becomes a noose around their necks. I suppose the general idea was that of ‘Men plan and gods laugh’ - either way, the concept was one of poking fun at the illusion of human control over our actions and their consequences in what is essentially a blind and pitiless universe.
  My third novel, aka BAD FOR GOOD, which is currently out under consideration, is an attempt to get at a different kind of comedy. Again, it’s a crime narrative, in which a hospital porter deranged by logic decides to blow up the hospital where he works, in order to illustrate how all civilisations (in this case, Western civilisation) are undone from within rather than destroyed by external forces. The humour is decidedly darker than previously; the protagonist, Karlsson, allows for no limits on his imagination when it comes to inventing ingenious ways to persecute his superiors. But the form, too, is an attempt to move away from the traditional crime novel narrative. It’s a meta-fiction, in which failed writer Declan Burke finds his own person, and that of his family, under attack by his deranged creation, Karlsson. The idea is to fold back the violence writers propagate onto the writer himself, and to have Declan Burke live with the consequences of his wilful depravity. Whether the conceit works is up to others to decide, but for now I’m happy that the story is at least an attempt to come to terms with the responsibility a crime writer bears in terms of the ways in which he or she employs violence in their novels.
  Anyway, that’s my two cents on the comic crime novel. I should point out, by the way, that my own experience of writing and publishing comic crime novels has been that while readers tend to like them as a change of pace from more serious fare, they’re not generally taken all that seriously by the industry’s mainstream, either by publishers or readers. That may well be because of the way I’ve written those particular novels, or because people don’t as a rule take comedy seriously. I’d imagine it’s very probably a combination of both. Bateman, whose debut novel DIVORCING JACK poked fun at warring paramilitaries and won the Betty Trask prize, and whose THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL recently won The Last Laugh award at CrimeFest, is one of the few exceptions. And that’s a shame, I think. Writers of serious crime novels who overdose on gratuitous violence and torture porn are no more realistic in terms of the truth of crime than comedy writers who exaggerate the tropes and blend genres. The funniest novel I’ve read so far this year has been Anthony Zuiker’s DARK ORIGINS, a laughably bad tale of an anally-obsessed serial killer mastermind, at the conclusion of which I had the overwhelming desire to take a shower. At the very least the comedy writers, bless their cotton socks, are serious about making you laugh.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Sean Chercover

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?
I honestly don’t wish I’d written other people’s books. Just doesn’t occur to me to think that way. But if I had to pick one, it might be A DANCE AT THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE by Lawrence Block. Or any of the Factory series by Derek Raymond. Or PORT TROPIQUE by Barry Gifford. Or ...

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Popeye, the sailor man.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I spend far too much time reading cookbooks.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Probably when my two-year-old son held up a copy of TRIGGER CITY and said, “Trigga Ciddy! Da-Da book!”

The best Irish crime novel is …?
The Jack Taylor series, by Ken Bruen. PRIEST may be my favourite, but I look at that series as one long episodic novel. Another that I could wish I’d written, if I thought that way.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Well, I’m very excited that a couple of Ken’s books are being made into movies. I’m a big fan of Declan Hughes and I think his work would play well on the big screen. And John Connolly is awesome. THE BLACK ANGEL would make a great movie.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst? The critical voices in my head that jeer at me when the writing isn’t going well. Best? Everything else. I absolutely love this job.

The pitch for your next book is …?
... a secret, for now.

Who are you reading right now?
God. Well, not God, but those cats who wrote the Bible. And a bunch of books on Buddhism and Voodoo and quantum physics. All research for my current work-in-progress.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
That’s just cruel. I suspect that if stopped reading, my writing would start to suck after a while, so I’m tempted to choose reading. But if I’m tempted, then maybe it isn’t really God. Maybe it’s Satan. So maybe I should choose writing. Either way, I’m screwed.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Modesty forbids. But if you want to see what words other people use to describe my writing, scoot on over to www.chercover.com, where you can read plenty of review quotes, learn more about me and my books, and even enter a contest and maybe win stuff.

Sean Chercover’s latest novel is TRIGGER CITY

On Coincidences, Happy Accidents And The Possibility Of Magic

A Grand Vizier writes: “‘And so / The beginning is near / And we face / The opening curtain …’ The uncorrected proofs of THE BIG O arrived in the post from Harcourt yesterday, sparking all kinds of conflicting emotions in the Grand Viz’s heaving-but-manly breast. Delight and pride, obviously, that a life-long dream has inched another step closer to fruition, given that, as with the niche genres of Western movies and jazz music, America is the spiritual home of the crime novel. Yes indeed, I shall – for a moment or two at least, on September 22nd – be a bona fide Yankee doodle dandy.
  “The delight and pride lasted all of three seconds, of course, after which I was assailed by the usual doubts and uncertainties. How will it be received? Are American tables as wonky-legged as Irish tables, and thus in need of a one-size-fits-all book to prop up bockety workmanship? Will the book sell well, badly, or at all? Will Elmore Leonard and / or Barry Gifford sue? Questions, questions …
  “Coincidentally enough – especially given that THE BIG O has its fair share of coincidences – the proof edits of its sequel, currently labouring under the unlikely title of THE BLUE ORANGE, arrived on the same day. The woman behind the metaphorical green pen, the inimitable Marsha Swan of Hag’s Head Press, pronounced herself reasonably satisfied with the contents, declaring that it largely replicates the good things about THE BIG O, only moreso. She has some issues with various aspects, of course, as any self-respecting editor would, but nothing to cause the Grand Viz to throw himself from the battlements of CAP Towers in a veritable tizzy of despair. Happy days.
  “Naturally, once the correction process begins, the entire story will reveal itself as utterly incomprehensible, totally unbelievable, and collapse into a heap of dust. But we don’t have to worry about that until Monday. Huzzah! In the meantime, we’re going to take the fact that the corrections arrived on the same day as THE BIG O’s uncorrected proofs as A Good Omen.
  “That’s not a very logical state of affairs, but then life – and particularly the writing books bit – is rarely logical. That’s not to say that writers are necessarily a superstitious bunch, but most writers are more than pleased to embrace the concept of ‘happy accidents’. As often as not the writing process will involve a blind reaching forward into the darkness in the hope of finding some meaning or cohesion to the chaos and anarchy you’ve established, and only belatedly discovering that you were always aware of where the Eureka! moment lay, you just had to wallow in the bath long enough for it to drift into the front of your brain. The sparkity-spark fusing of synapses, the unnatural juxtaposition of two or three or four factors coming together in a situation you might have found yourself in ten or twelve years ago, that throwaway remark a secondary character made in Chapter 3 – suddenly the cave explodes into light and the paintings on the wall start to dance.
  “A confession: I’m not a good writer. By that I mean, as I’ve said before, that I’m not a naturally instinctive elegant writer. When it’s going well for yours truly, it means that the grubbing out of words, one painful syllable at a time, is progressing at an unnaturally rapid pace – a thousand words in a three-hour session would represent a good day at the desk for the Grand Viz. That micro-writing approach also applies to such fripperies as plotting and narrative arc – although I usually have a general idea of how I’d like things to work out, the plotting tends to run roughly a page or two ahead of the writing. I like it when I’m surprised by something a character might say or want to do, and being curious as to what they’ve cooked up in my absence is one of most powerful draws that brings me back to the desk every morning. That sounds a little infantile, certainly, but here’s the thing – I heard Richard Ford interviewed on the radio once, and he spoke very eloquently about how meticulously he plots his novels before he begins to write. As a callow page-blackener – I’d yet to have a novel published at the time – I thought that I certainly didn’t have any right to argue with Richard Ford. But I also thought, y’know, where’s the blummin’ fun in that?
  “Maybe writing isn’t supposed to be fun. The publishing business is exactly that, a business. And the most successful writers will very likely be those who approach the process of writing in a pragmatic way, asking themselves what the reader wants and delivering exactly that. And good luck to them all.
  “But here’s the other thing. Being an adult with a young child, as yours truly is delighted to be, means becoming something of a machine that benefits from being pragmatic, logical and forward-planning. But even adults with young children get time off, and the Grand Viz gets to spend his time off writing stories. There isn’t a lot of that kind of time available, so the last thing he wants to do is waste that precious time and imagination space being logical and pragmatic. What he does like to do is open himself up to happy accidents, coincidences and the possibility of magic. Which was why he was so delighted when Reed Farrel Coleman (right), so generously quoted on the back of the U.S. edition of THE BIG O, embraced the coincidences in the story so whole-heartedly, and in the spirit they were intended. Because the writing process itself – for yours truly, at least – is heavily informed by those happy accidents, coincidences and the possibility of magic.
  “Yep, that sounds dangerously hippy. But here’s the other-other thing. How the brain – the mind, the imagination – works is still largely a mystery, even to neuroscientists. Why certain synapses should fuse and produce certain emotional reactions, for example, can be explained by chemical secretions as a response to a given situation. But when you go deeper, all the way down to the quantum level that sustains and generates everything we are and can know, what prevails is chaos and anarchy. It may be that we are yet not smart enough to discover the patterns in the apparent randomness, and it may well be that there are no patterns to be discovered. Either way, at least for the time being, yours truly is entirely content to embrace all those happy accidents, coincidences and the possibility of magic.
  “Naïve? Yes. Impractical? You could argue so. Fun? Most certainly.
  “It may not be a very logical way of conducting a writing life, but yours truly will go on not just embracing but anticipating those happy accidents. The day the writing ceases to be fun is the day I hang up the quill. Peace, out.”

Gonzo Noir: Weird On Top And Wild At Heart?

A certain Neil was kind enough to leave a comment on Friday’s post about Barry Gifford’s WILD AT HEART, in which he described said novel as ‘Gonzo noir’. Our interest was piqued, not least because ‘Gonzo Noir’ was – and is – a potential title the Grand Vizier had earmarked for a work-in-progress he has Cheeky ‘Chico’ Morientes (right) currently sweating away over down in the CAP’s deepest dungeon. Being something of a sub-literate moron, of course, the Grand Viz hadn’t realised that ‘Gonzo noir’ is the name of a sub-sub-genre of the crime writing school, and that he was – and remains – in great danger of making a pas of the faux variety.
  So what is this strange beast ‘Gonzo noir’? Dispatching Chief Google Elf post-haste, we came up with the following references:

“The plot is pure gonzo noir, faking rights and taking lefts, jumping back and slapping the reader in the face. It’s certainly a breathless read. The violence is often shocking, vicious and, especially towards the end of the book, defiantly turned up to eleven. It might smack of sadism were it not for the fact that Williams writes with genuine finesse and a streak of black humour a mile wide,” says Crime Culture of Charlie Williams’ DEADFOLK.

“A booze-soaked tribute to those great gonzo noir writers of days gone by,” was Anthony Neil Smith’s verdict on Craig McDonald’s HEAD GAMES.

Over at Confessions of An Idiosyncratic Mind, Anthony Neil Smith gives the skinny on his own novel, PSYCHOSOMATIC: “As far as the plot, well, it’s certainly one of those ‘gonzo noir’ types, full of vivid violence and nastiness.”

Meanwhile, an interview over at Mooky Chick beginneth thusly: “Author of THE CONTORTIONIST HANDBOOK and the upcoming DERMAPHORIA, Craig Clevenger writes gonzo noir about identity and emotional freefall in a way you probably haven’t seen before.”

Then there’s James R. Winter over at January Magazine, reviewing Marc Lecard’s debut novel: “VINNIE’S HEAD, by debut novelist Marc Lecard, brings gonzo noir to Long Island ... VINNIE’S HEAD is a lesson in the absurd. Lecard spins an unbelievable plot and laces it with cartoonish violence and bizarre players. Yet he does so with tongue firmly planted in cheek ... Critics mention Carl Hiassen when talking about this book. Kinky Friedman also came to mind as I read it.”

  So there we have it: black humour; narrative fake-outs; slapping the reader in the face; shocking, vivid and / or cartoonish violence; bizarre players; identity and emotional freefall.
  So far, so good, at least for the Grand Viz’s work-in-progress. But what of the crucial ‘gonzo’ element itself, that which is derived from the Great Gonzo himself, the sadly missed Hunter S. Thompson (right), and which – presumably, at least – involves the author inserting him or herself into the text, Kinky-style? Quoth the Wikipedia research boffins:

Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism which is written subjectively, often including the reporter as part of the story via a first person narrative. The style tends to blend factual and fictional elements to emphasize an underlying message and engage the reader. The word Gonzo was first used in 1970 to describe an article by Hunter S. Thompson, who later popularized the style. The term has since been applied to other subjective artistic endeavours …
The term “Gonzo” in connection to Hunter S. Thompson (right) was first used by Boston Globe magazine editor Bill Cardoso in 1970 when he described Hunter S. Thompson’s The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved, which was written for the June 1970 Scanlan’s Monthly, as “pure Gonzo journalism”. Cardoso claimed that “gonzo” was South Boston Irish slang describing the last man standing after an all night drinking marathon. Cardoso also claimed that it was a corruption of the French Canadian word “gonzeaux”, which means “shining path”, although this is disputed. In Italian, Gonzo is a common word for a gullible person, a “sucker” …

  Anyone else have any contribution to make? If any of you beautiful people out there can shed any light on the truth of ‘Gonzo noir’, we’d love to hear from you …

The Friday Project: WILD AT HEART by Barry Gifford

Patti Abbott is working on a project called Fridays: The Book You Have to Read, the gist of which is to refresh people’s memories about great books that might have slipped off the radar. Last week we did Horace McCoy’s KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE. This week we’re picking – trumpet parp, if you will, maestro – Barry Gifford’s WILD AT HEART.

“Findin’ out the meanin’ of life and all is fine, far as it goes, but dead’s dead, you know what I mean?”
  Barry Gifford, WILD AT HEART

Barry Gifford doesn’t waste words. WILD AT HEART – THE STORY OF SAILOR AND LULA (1990) is a novel written by an author who is also a prize-winning poet, which partially explains his ability to pack 44 chapters into 156 pages and also goes some way towards explaining the impressionistic, imagistic style he employs. Each chapter is a short, punchy vignette in which Sailor and Lula outline their philosophy on life while striving to stay one step ahead of the law and the potential killer Lula’s Mama has set on their trail. A seamless blend of ’30s hard-boiled brevity and the on-the-road Beat tradition of the ’50s, WILD AT HEART comes on like the deranged offspring of Horace McCoy and Jack Kerouac as he struggles to draw breath in the sultry atmosphere of a William Faulkner short story.
  On his release from prison after serving a term for manslaughter, Sailor Ripley breaks parole and takes to the road with Lula Pace Fortune in order to escape the oppressive grasp of Lula’s disproving mother, Marietta. The plot doesn’t get any more convoluted than that; what sustains WILD AT HEART’s narrative is the colourful cast of characters the couple encounter on their flight west towards California. By turns intriguing, bizarre, grotesque and lethal, the collection of misfits only serves to confirm Lula’s heartfelt conviction that the world is indeed ‘wild at heart and weird on top.’
  Imbued with Southern gentility and decorum, Gifford’s style has been described by critic Patrick Beach as ‘chicken-fried noir’ and – as per the rules of hard-boiled fiction – a happy ending is never on the cards for the star-crossed lovers. “Safe?” exclaims Marietta’s friend, Dal. “Safe? Ain’t that a stitch. Ain’t nobody nowhere never been safe a second of their life.” The frisson generated by a blend of uncertain direction and inevitable danger crackles from the back seat of Lula’s white ’75 Bonneville convertible. A distraught Lula can force Sailor to dump a crazy hitchhiker when the kid gets a little too weird for her liking, but she remains all too aware of the overwhelming forces – not least of which is that of Fate – ranged against the pair:

Sailor stroked Lula’s head.
“It ain’t gonna be forever, peanut.”
Lula closed her eyes.
“I know, Sailor. Nothin’ is.”

The Embiggened O # 943: Yet Another Little Ray Of Sunshine

Greetings from the grimy coalface of independent publishing, folks, where the big-ups we’ve been begging from actual real writers have been coming in thick and thicker for our humble offering, THE BIG O. The latest ray of sunshine comes, appropriately enough, from Ray Banks, whose arm we viciously Indian-burned until he finally uncled and (ahem) volunteered the following:

“THE BIG O is a scintillating mixture of genuine wit, charm by the bucket-load and the kind of whip-crack plotting that makes “a couple of pages” turn into an all-nighter. Burke has [George V.] Higgins’ gift for dialogue, [Barry] Gifford’s concision and the effortless cool of Elmore Leonard at his peak. In short, THE BIG O is an essential crime novel of 2007, and one of the best of any year.” – Ray Banks, author of DONKEY PUNCH

Ray? Sorry about the, y’know, assault. But we’re told Indian burns don’t leave any actual scars …

Flick Lit # 139: The Story of Sailor and Lula / Wild at Heart

“Findin’ out the meanin’ of life and all is fine, far as it goes, but dead’s dead, you know what I mean?”

Barry Gifford doesn’t mince words. Wild at Heart – The Story of Sailor and Lula (1990) is a novel written by an author who is also a prize-winning poet, which partially explains his ability to pack 44 chapters into 156 pages, and also goes some way towards explaining the impressionistic, imagistic style he employs. Each chapter is a short, punchy vignette in which Sailor and Lula outline their philosophy on life while striving to stay one step ahead of the law and the potential killer Lula’s mama has set on their trail. A seamless blend of ’40s hard-boiled brevity and the on-the-road Beat of the ’50s, Wild at Heart comes on like some deranged, addled offspring of Horace McCoy and Jack Kerouac as he struggles to draw breath in the steamy, sultry atmosphere of a William Faulkner short story. On his release from prison after serving a term for manslaughter, Sailor Ripley breaks parole and takes to the road with Lula Pace Fortune in order to escape the oppressive grasp of Lula’s disproving mother, Marietta. The plot doesn’t get any more convoluted than that; what sustains the narrative is the colourful cast of characters the couple encounter on their flight west towards California. By turns bizarre, grotesque and lethal, the collection of misfits only serves to confirm Lula’s heartfelt conviction that the world is indeed ‘wild at heart and weird on top.’ Imbued with Southern gentility and decorum, Gifford’s style has been described by critic Patrick Beach as ‘chicken-fried noir’ and – as per the rules of hard-boiled fiction – a happy ending is never on the cards for the star-crossed lovers. “Safe?” exclaims Marietta’s friend, Dal. “Safe? Ain’t that a stitch. Ain’t nobody nowhere never been safe a second of their life.” The frisson generated by a blend of uncertain direction and inevitable danger crackles from the back seat of Lula’s white ’75 Bonneville convertible. A distraught Lula can force Sailor to dump a crazy hitchhiker when the kid gets a little too weird for her liking, but she remains all too aware of the overwhelming forces – not least of which is Fate – ranged against the pair.

Sailor stroked Lula’s head.
“It ain’t gonna be forever, peanut.”
Lula closed her eyes.
“I know, Sailor. Nothin’ is.”

A collaboration between Barry Gifford and David Lynch must have seemed an unlikely prospect after the publication of Gifford’s collection of ‘film impressions’, The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1988), in which Gifford refers to Lynch’s critically acclaimed Blue Velvet (1986) as “One cut above a snuff film.” Collaborate they did, however, and while Lynch applied his trademark visual hyperbole to the project, the movie remains faithful in tone and narrative to Gifford’s novel. However, Lynch infected the dream-like innocence of the tale with nightmarish overtones. The recurring motif is that of a perverse vision of The Wizard of Oz. It appears – and with Lynch no one can ever be really sure – that the director was offering his own inimitable version of how the American Dream has evolved into a nightmare. Elvis Presley – the ultimate poor-boy-made-good – is reincarnated in the poses Nic Cage strikes, his cornpone philosophy, and Cage even sings a couple of classic Elvis tunes. Wild at Heart, asserts Richard Scheib, is ‘a ’50s rock ‘n’ roll movie gone to hell’. That runs counter to Catherine Texier’s claim, in the New York Times Book Review, that “Gifford’s characters inhabit a surreal world that is both hilarious and sad ... naively sentimental yet tough as nails.” Lynch sustains Gifford’s vision of the ‘naively sentimental’ through Sailor and Lula’s unbreakable devotion to one another, but also exaggerates the surreal, investing the minor characters with a menace and threat that goes far beyond that imagined by the author. The result is a movie that evolves from a road trip into a head-trip, a hallucinatory experience in which the worst possible imaginable consequences are only a fairy-tale reference away. Lynch, however, has rarely been in such command of his material and his authority is transmitted to the screen by a superb ensemble cast that includes Harry Dean Stanton, Willem Dafoe, Isabella Rossellini, Crispin Glover and Diane Ladd. Critics and fans remain divided over the merits of Wild at Heart (the movie did secure the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival) but one thing is certain – Wild at Heart redefined the road movie genre, pushing the parameters so far as to ensure that even the neo-realism of Oliver Stone’s notorious Natural Born Killers struggled to match its swaggering bravado. As Lula herself would say: “Dreams ain’t no odder than real life … Sometimes not by half.”– Michael McGowan