Review: BELFAST NOIR, edited by Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville

In crime fiction, noir can be a difficult definition to nail down, although most commentators agree that the purest form of noir incorporates an especially bleak and fatalistic tone, stories in which characters are doomed regardless of how they twist and turn in a desperate bid to escape their fate.
  In that sense it could be argued that Belfast Noir, the latest city-based collection of short stories from Akashic Books, arrives a couple of decades too late, now that Belfast is, thankfully, no longer “the most noir place on earth”, as Adrian McKinty, quoting Lee Child, claims in the introduction to this book.
  That said, noir can also represent a broad church within crime fiction’s parameters, as the diversity of the stories in this collection suggests. It’s also true that Belfast Noir is timely, given that the last decade has seen the emergence of a generation of Northern Irish crime writers who are engaged with post-Troubles fiction, with authors such as McKinty and his coeditor, Stuart Neville, plus Claire McGowan, Brian McGilloway, Gerard Brennan, Sam Millar and Garbhan Downey, adding their voices to those who were publishing during the Troubles, such as Eoin McNamee, Eugene McEldowney and Colin Bateman.
  If it’s disappointing but understandable that McKinty and Neville have opted not to contribute stories of their own to the collection, Colin Bateman’s absence is more surprising, not least because his Divorcing Jack, featuring his journalist turned private investigator, Dan Starkey, and published in the mid 1990s, is a seminal novel of Irish crime writing. Bateman’s blend of crime tropes and irreverent humour is present here, however, in a number of contributions.
  Claire McGowan’s Rosie Grant’s Finger is an offbeat comic tale featuring an 18-year-old private eye who cycles around Belfast; Sam Millar’s Out of Time features the wisecracking private eye Karl Kane; Garbhan Downey’s hard-boiled but jocular tale Die Like a Rat is stitched through with cynical one-liners about the newspaper business.
  For the most part the contributing authors play a straight bat. Brian McGilloway’s The Undertaking sets the tone with a tale about an undertaker who is presented with an offer he can’t refuse by former paramilitaries who now police the Belfast streets.
  Arlene Hunt’s Pure Game is set in the grim world of dog-fighting, an allegory of sorts in which strutting hardmen send out ill-treated animals to kill on their behalf.
  Gerard Brennan’s Ligature is a tale of petty crime, teenage rebellion and punitive reprisals, a heartbreaking story offering an intimate snapshot of crime and punishment in Belfast. Wet With Rain by Lee Child, the Jack Reacher author, who qualifies courtesy of a Belfast-born father, offers a take on the cold war involving Troubles-era paramilitaries.
  One of the most interesting contributions is from Steve Cavanagh. The Grey is a courtroom drama that in its very form argues for the normalisation of fiction’s treatment of post-Troubles Belfast, although Cavanagh’s narrator, a lawyer, is fully aware of how the “comforting blanket” of Belfast’s new grey architecture reflects the moral climate.
The editors also take the bold step of commissioning a number of stories from authors who aren’t crime writers.
  The science-fiction writer Ian McDonald contributes The Reservoir, a wedding-day story about dark secrets with a distinctly Gothic flavour. In Poison Lucy Caldwell reminds us that not all “crimes” break the law, even if they do have the power to destroy lives. Glenn Patterson’s Belfast Punk REP is one of the noirest of the stories, harking back to the halcyon days of Northern Ireland’s punk era and vividly illustrating the brutal dangers of not belonging to one or another of Belfast’s self-defining tribes.   Highlights include Ruth Dudley Edwards’ Taking It Serious, an unsettling pen picture of a young man obsessed with the fading glories of the recent past, and one that serves as a rebuttal to McKinty’s optimistic assertion in the introduction that “only the most hardened individuals would feel a return to the grey desolation of the ’70s and ’80s is a sacrifice worth making”. Alex Barclay’s The Reveller is a darkly poetic tale of revenge and self-annihilating redemption that strikes a disturbingly ambiguous note as it concludes the collection.
  Eoin McNamee’s Corpse Flowers is the most fully realised noir of all the contributions: a PSNI investigation into the murder of a young woman told at one remove via snapshots gleaned from a number of visual cues, including CCTV and home-movies, “the difficult-to-piece together recollections, the lyric fragments of the street traffic and retail security cams”.
  Belfast Noir is an uneven collection overall, given that less than half of the stories would qualify as strictly noir. For the less pedantic reader, however, it is a fascinating document of its time and place, and one that showcases the diverse talents of an increasingly impressive generation of Northern Ireland crime writers. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

Publication: WHITE CHURCH, BLACK MOUNTAIN by Thomas Paul Burgess

Described as a ‘punk pioneer’ by no less an authority than Glenn Patterson, Thomas Paul Burgess – now a senior lecturer at University College Cork – publishes his debut crime novel WHITE CHURCH, BLACK MOUNTAIN (Matador). To wit:

What links a traumatic childhood secret with the murder of a high-ranking police officer and two young men facing terrorist death threats? In Belfast, Northern Ireland, the fragile Peace Process is still haunted by the crimes of the past. Truth and justice have become the currency through which victim and terrorist alike must purchase their closure regarding the conflict ... When Detective Inspector Dan Watson of the Historical Enquiries Team enters an interview room for a routine consultation, he is astonished by the recognition of an eerily familiar face - Eban Barnard, the younger brother of his late partner and mentor Detective Superintendent Alex, who was brutally assassinated by the Provisional IRA twenty years earlier. What Dan learns in that room defies credulity and threatens to open up a Pandora’s Box of secrets that will unhinge the lives of all those involved - and endanger the very peace process itself. Based on actual events, and set against the backdrop of a society’s hunger for redemptive catharsis, White Church, Black Mountain is a tightly-constructed, fast-paced novel that follows the dysfunctional life of the misanthropic Eban as he traverses a generation of secrets and lies. Unlike many of the novels about ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland, White Church, Black Mountain is at the forefront of an emerging ‘post-conflict’ canon, considering the legacy of the conflict as it impacts upon those who seek to build a future in its aftermath.

  Colin Bateman, for one, is impressed: “White Church, Black Mountain just sucks you in. Like Brian Moore given a make-over by James Ellroy. Excellent stuff.”
  For more, clickety-click here …

Interview: Anthony Quinn

Arminta Wallace interviewed Anthony Quinn (right) – author of DISAPPEARED, BORDER ANGELS and THE BLOOD DIMMED TIDE – for the Irish Times over the weekend, and a very good read it is too. Sample quote:

“One of the biggest influences on me is Graham Greene. He was very good at bringing out the darkness in everybody as well as the light. PD James and Ruth Rendell are also influences. But I would say that Stuart Neville and Colin Bateman have influenced me in more subtle ways, in that they first took on writing about the Troubles and using detective fiction to do it. They knocked away my inhibitions in that respect.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Feature: The Alternative Irish Crime Novel of the Year

It’s that time of the year again, as the Irish Book Awards hove into view on November 26th, when I suggest that [insert year here] has been yet another annus terrificus for Irish crime fiction, aka ‘Emerald Noir’. The shortlist for the Irish Crime Novel of the Year runs as follows:

The Ireland AM Crime Fiction Award

Can Anybody Help Me? by Sinéad Crowley
Last Kiss by Louise Phillips
The Final Silence by Stuart Neville
The Kill by Jane Casey
The Secret Place by Tana French
Unravelling Oliver by Liz Nugent

  As always, however, there were a number of tremendous novels published that didn’t, for various reasons, feature on the shortlist. The following is another short list, of books I’ve read to date this year that are also easily good enough to win the title of best Irish crime fiction novel in 2014. As you might expect, there were also a number of very good novels that I didn’t manage to read this year; but the gist of this post is to celebrate the quality and diversity of Irish crime fiction in 2014. To wit:

The Dead Pass, Colin Bateman
The Black Eyed Blonde, Benjamin Black
The Wolf in Winter, John Connolly
Bitter Remedy, Conor Fitzgerald
Cross of Vengeance, Cora Harrison
The Sun is God, Adrian McKinty
Blue is the Night, Eoin McNamee
The Boy That Never Was, Karen Perry

  Finally, the very best of luck to all the shortlisted nominees on November 26th. Given that she has been oft-nominated and is yet to win, and her Maeve Kerrigan series grows more impressive with each succeeding book, my vote goes to Jane Casey’s THE KILL …

Reviews: Lehane, Minato, Bateman, Tey, Child

Mystic River, Shutter Island and Gone, Baby, Gone were all very fine film adaptations of Dennis Lehane novels, so there’s a kind of inevitability to the fact that Lehane’s latest offering, The Drop (Abacus, €11.95), is published as a tie-in with the cinematic release of the movie of the same name (the book began life as a short story, ‘Animal Rescue’, before Lehane, previously a writer on The Wire, developed the short story for the film’s screenplay). Bob Saginowski works as a barman at a Boston bar which serves as a front for the laundering of illicit cash by Balkan gangsters. A lonely, God-fearing man, Bob’s life of quiet desperation becomes more emotionally involving than he might prefer when he adopts a brutalised puppy and incurs the wrath of the neighbourhood’s resident sociopath. When Bob’s bar is held up at gunpoint not long afterwards, and the Balkan mob demand its money be retrieved regardless of the cost, Bob realises that the time has come when he must step up and make a stand for what matters. Unsurprisingly, given its origins, The Drop is a slim novel but it’s one that bears the unmistakable Lehane imprint. Saginowski is an archetypal Lehane hero, an introspective, put-upon man with deeply held moral principles and a long, slow-burning fuse. The prose lacks the elegance of Lehane’s recent historical epics The Given Day (2008) and Live By Night (2012) but the story compensates with its incident-packed intensity, dialogue-driven narrative and sharply etched characters.

  Kanae Minato’s Confessions (Mulholland Books, €13.40) opens with middle school teacher Yuko Moriguchi informing her class of the tragic death of her four-year-old daughter, and of the terrible revenge she has wrought on the two pupils who murdered her child. Moriguichi’s ‘confession’, however, is only the opening salvo: the book is composed of a number of first-person accounts from characters who all have secrets to hide and sins to expiate, including those of both the young killers. The intimate nature of the narrative contributes to a harrowing account of a generation of Japanese teenagers that has lost its way, particularly as Minato eschews sensationalism for a style that favours a crisp, clear-eyed account of the various motives and agendas (the novel is translated with impressive economy by Stephen Snyder). Despite the bleak tone, however, the intimacy of the first-person accounts affords Minato the opportunity to delve deep into each character’s personality, which hugely complicates the reader’s response to the story by giving these ostensibly soulless teenagers an unexpected poignancy.

  Colin Bateman’s Belfast-based Dan Starkey – formerly a journalist, now a private investigator – has been charting the changes in Northern Ireland since he first appeared in Divorcing Jack (1995). The Dead Pass (Headline, €18.99) is Starkey’s 10th outing, and finds him in unfamiliar territory in Derry – or Londonderry, as he insists on calling it – when he is commissioned by concerned mother and former political activist Moira Doherty to find her missing son, Billy. What follows is an old-fashioned gumshoe tale of snooping, beatings and snide quips, shot through with Bateman’s anarchic sense of humour (the story involves dissident Republicanism, a teenage Messiah and soft-core pornography), as Northern Ireland’s ‘Sam Spud’, as one character dubs him, doggedly pursues the trail of justice and truth. Despite all the gags, puns and post-modern re-imagining of the role of the fictional private eye, The Dead Pass is most notable for its sombre undertone, as the investigation wanders up and down Derry’s backstreets and comes to the conclusion that Northern Ireland’s post-Troubles peace is a very fragile construct that could very easily splinter or explode.
  First published in 1952, and the last of Josephine Tey’s novels to feature Inspector Alan Grant, The Singing Sands (Folio Society, €29.99) finds Grant suffering from a breakdown and taking himself off to the Highlands to recuperate on a fishing holiday. Disembarking from the train in Scotland, Grant realises that a man has died in the compartment next to his. When Grant finds himself in possession of the dead man’s newspaper, upon which has been scrawled some intriguing lines of poetry, his policeman’s mind goes into overdrive. Beloved by crime and mystery writers, Tey is regarded as one of the most brilliantly imaginative of the UK’s ‘Golden Age’ of mystery authors. Delivered in a crisp, formal and lyrical style, this reissue from the Folio Society – which is beautifully illustrated by Mark Smith – showcases Tey’s facility for a plot that is as absorbing as it is incredible (the tale turns on the discovery of a very unusual ‘Atlantis’). The Singing Sands is as good a place as any to rediscover (or discover) one of the great mystery writers, although purists may instead point you to the standalone titles The Franchise Affair (1948) or Brat Farrar (1949), both of which are also reissued by the Folio Society.

  Personal (Bantam, €18.99) is Lee Child’s 19th novel to feature the nomadic Jack Reacher, an ex-Military Policeman who wanders the United States dispensing rough justice. When a sniper attempts to assassinate the French president from a distance of 1,400 yards, Reacher and his former colleagues at the CIA come to the same conclusion: the sniper can only be John Kott, an ex-Special Forces operative whom Reacher sent to prison some 15 years previously, and now on the loose. Dispatched to London, Reacher’s mission is to prevent Kott from killing a world leader during the forthcoming G8 Summit – but first Reacher must negotiate the labyrinthine world of London’s criminal gangs. Child employs a laconic tone and dust-dry humour as he delivers yet another convoluted tale in direct and forthright prose, a blend that seems to mock the self-effacing Reacher’s rather implausible invincibility even as the story itself celebrates our need for such heroes.

  This column was first published in the Irish Times.

Eyes On The Prize(s)

Apologies for the breakdown in transmission over the last fortnight, folks, but yours truly trundled off to Cyprus for a holiday, where a wonderful time was had by all.
  Back to business, then, and we’ll kick off again with a hearty congratulations to Adrian McKinty (right), Gene Kerrigan and Stuart Neville, all of whom have been shortlisted for Barry Awards. Nice work, gents. Adrian McKinty has all the details and the full shortlists over here …
  And while we’re on the topic of award nominations, it’s an equally hearty bon chance to The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman, who has been shortlisted – for about the seven hundredth time – for the Goldsboro ‘Last Laugh’ gong, which will be awarded at Crimefest next month. Colin Bateman, as I’m sure you all know, is a previous winner of the ‘Last Laugh’ award, which is given for Best Humourous Crime Novel. For all the details – and all the Crimefest award shortlists – clickety-click here …

Through An Hourglass, Darkly

Of that small but perfectly formed generation of Irish crime writers who began publishing in the mid- to late-1990s – which included Colin Bateman, Ken Bruen, John Connolly and Eoin McNamee – one has slipped out of sight in recent times. Here’s hoping the reissue of Julie Parsons’ THE HOURGLASS (Macmillan) goes some way towards redirecting the spotlight in her direction. To wit:

Beyond high iron gates fastened shut with a length of chain, lies the stark, beautiful Trawbawn. Here, haunted by a dark, mysterious past and largely ignored by the people of nearby Skibbereen, lives the frail Lydia Beauchamp. But old Ma Beauchamp’s private existence is interrupted when a stranger arrives - a young man called Adam who wanders into the vast grounds of Trawbawn and becomes one of Lydia's most welcome contacts with the outside world. When Lydia sets her new confidante a challenge, he eagerly accepts - Adam must travel to Dublin to find her estranged daughter. But it is a task tainted by an air of menace. For what terrible past has driven a daughter from her mother? And what true motive lies behind Adam's generous act? Soon the unlikely friends are entwined in a deadly game, and a pursuit born of an old lady’s desire for peace mutates into a terrible, relentless need for revenge . . .

  THE HOURGLASS will be reissued on February 13th. For more on Julie Parsons, clickety-click here …

The Write Stuff

JJ Toner has just launched a short story competition, ‘Write4Autism’, with the intention of raising awareness of, and funding for, Enhanced Services for Autism Spectrum Disorder Initiatives (ASDI), a registered charity working with adults with Autism in Ireland. To wit:

Write4Autism is a new short story competition, launching today. The prize fund will be determined by the number of entries received, up to a maximum of €4,500 (about $6,000).

The prizes on offer are as follows:

First prize 50% of the prize fund up to a maximum of €2,250 (about $3,000)
Second prize 25% of the prize fund up to a maximum of €1,125 (about $1,500)
Third prize 10% of the prize fund up to a maximum of €450 (about $600)
18 addition prizes from the remaining 15% of the prize fund up to a maximum of €37.50 (about $50)

The entry fee is €7.50 (about $10) per story, the word limit 1,500 words.

We have a judging panel of three great writers: Colin Bateman, Declan Burke and Lucille Redmond.

The proceeds from the competition will be used to fund Enhanced Services for Autism Spectrum Disorder Initiatives (ASDI), a registered charity working with adults with Autism in Ireland.

Depending on the quality of the winning stories, they may be published in an eBook for Kindle, with the proceeds of this eBook going to the charity.

For all the details, clickety-click here.

Derry’s Killer Books

Brian McGilloway is curating the ‘Killer Books’ event in Derry next month, which takes place under the aegis of the City of Culture 2013 and runs from November 1st to November 3rd. Brian took to Facebook a couple of days back to give a flavour of the event, which runs a lot like this:

“I’m hugely excited to be curating Killer Books at the Verbal Arts Centre in Derry, supported by Easons, from 1-3rd Nov. Guest authors include Lee Child, Ann Cleeves, Colin Bateman, Stuart Neville, Claire McGowan, Declan Burke, Declan Hughes, Louise Phillips, William Ryan, John McAllister, Gerard Brennan, Andrew Pepper, Alan Glynn, Arlene Hunt, Paul Charles, Dave Barclay, Garbhan Downey, Des Doherty and more. I’ll also be launching HURT on Friday 1st in the Verbal Arts at 7pm. There will also be CSI demonstrations, Victorian murder tours of the city walls, story telling, special kids events and much, much more.”

  For details on how to book tickets, etc., contact the Verbal Arts Centre on 02871 266946.

Review: SCREWED By Eoin Colfer

You’ll have heard by now, no doubt, that Disney has given the green light to a movie based on the first two books Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series, and excellent news it is. There’s no word yet as to when the movie will be made or released, but it might be no harm to start bracing yourself now for Artemis-mania.
  Anyway, I reviewed Eoin Colfer’s adult comedy caper, SCREWED, for the Irish Times last month. It ran a lot like this:

SCREWED by Eoin Colfer (Headline)
When did crime fiction get so serious? The banter between Holmes and Watson, Poirot’s peacock posturing, Philip Marlowe’s zingy one-liners – for some of the genre’s most accomplished practitioners, humour was an essential element when it came to creating fully-rounded characters.
  These days the fashion is for dark, gritty realism. There are crime writers who employ humour to a greater or lesser degree, such as Colin Bateman, Elmore Leonard, Janet Evanovich, Carl Hiaasen and Christopher Brookmyre, but comic crime fiction remains, relatively speaking, a rarity.
  This may well be because many of the genre’s fans refuse to read comedy crime, for the very good reason that murder is no laughing matter. That interpretation, however, is another variation on the canard that comedy is necessarily a more trivial form than tragedy. Raymond Chandler once suggested, rather glibly, that if a writer was ever in doubt as to what should happen next, he should have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand. But whether the man is holding a gun or a custard pie is irrelevant; what matters is the man.
  Humour, and in particular a well-honed appreciation of the absurdity of human self-delusion, has long been a staple of Eoin Colfer’s work. As a best-selling author of children’s fiction, he struck gold with the blackly comic teenage criminal mastermind Artemis Fowl, and also wrote And Another Thing … (2009), the sixth instalment in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Colfer’s Half-Moon Investigations (2006) was a private eye novel, although the quirk there was that Fletcher Moon was a 12-year-old shamus prowling the mean streets of his school’s playground.
  It would have been a surprise, then, and possibly even a criminal waste, had Colfer abandoned comedy for his first adult crime offering, Plugged (2011). That novel featured Daniel McEvoy, an Irish Army veteran who once served in Lebanon and still suffered the psychological scars. A casino bouncer in the upscale New Jersey town of Cloisters, McEvoy got caught up in the murderous scheming of Irish-American mobster Mike Madden, and a ramshackle comedy caper ensued, in a style reminiscent of the late Donald Westlake.
  Dan McEvoy returns in Screwed, now the co-owner of the casino but no less indebted to Mike Madden. Commissioned by Madden to deliver a package of bearer bonds to a New York address, McEvoy understands that he is being set up as a patsy, but is nonetheless sucked into a turf war. The politics of gang warfare mean nothing to McEvoy, who is far more concerned with how the war might impact on his personal relationships. Armed with a unique set of lethal skills, he sets about defending his own tiny patch of turf.
  On the basis of that set-up, you might imagine that any movie adapted from Screwed would probably feature Liam Neeson growling threats into a mobile phone. McEvoy, however, is a decidedly unconventional crime fiction hero. Despite his army training and combat experience, he is a man plagued by self-doubt. McEvoy may well be skilled at killing a man at long or short range, but his thought processes are so tortuous – the novel is told in the first person – that the intended victim is more likely to expire from natural causes before McEvoy makes up his mind about the morality of a necessary murder.
  Indeed, McEvoy is in many ways everything the crime fiction hero should not be. The legacy of a drunken, abusive father has left him conflicted about his own capacity and appetite for violence. So far is he removed from the bed-hopping, womanising stereotype that he refuses to take advantage of Sofia, with whom he is besotted, on the basis that she occasionally confuses him with her long-lost husband, Carmine. The macho caricature of bad genre fiction is further undermined by the fact that McEvoy’s business partner and friend is the ‘super-gay’ ex-bouncer Jason, while McEvoy’s sharp eye for women’s fashion comes courtesy of his addiction to Joan Rivers’ Fashion Police TV show.
  Suffice to say that Dan McEvoy is a complicated man, and Colfer takes great pleasure in drop-kicking him into a story that reads a lot like a Coen Brothers’ take on The Sopranos. Indeed, part of the pleasure of Screwed is Colfer’s awareness of the conventions of the genre, and his willingness to bend them out of shape. The irreverence is refreshing right from the beginning, when the novel starts with McEvoy explaining how Elmore Leonard has decreed that no story should begin with a description of the weather, ‘but sometimes a story starts off with weather and does not give a damn about what some legendary genre guy recommends.’ Fair enough, but McEvoy then neglects to tell us what the weather is actually doing.
  That whimsical quality is probably the novel’s defining feature (“Men have climbed into wooden horses for eyes like that.”) but instead of proving a narrative distraction, the offbeat style is an integral element of Dan McEvoy’s attempt to cope with the way his life appears to be spiralling out of control. In Plugged, this quality occasionally veered off-course to become self-consciously wacky and zany, but Screwed is noticeably more controlled and direct in terms of its narrative thrust.
  It takes a very deft touch to weld the darker elements of noir to slapstick comedy, but Colfer’s aim has a laser-like focus and the joins very rarely show. The result is a hugely enjoyable caper that also functions as an affectionate homage to the genre. – Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

All Aboard The Bateman Express

Colin Bateman (right) has been running a Kickstarter campaign to fund DUBLIN EXPRESS, a new collection of short stories and a play, but – typically – Bateman won’t be stopping when that particular train pulls into the station. Quoth Colin:

“I am very enthusiastic about this model and I think and hope it’s a way to get new writers out there. So surplus funds from this campaign will go towards developing the idea into what I think of as a publishing equivalent of a micro-brewery – releasing books by new writers and partially crowd-funding them by fully embracing social media. I don’t think of it as ‘charity’ in any way, but as a way of getting people excited about new works and essentially funding them by pre-ordering copies. Even if they’re only partially funded by this method it will help considerably towards getting
them into print.
  “So I’m already talking to new authors, and I’m going to take a strong hand in shaping books and aiming them at particular markets. Initially I’m looking at children’s books in the 8-12 category because there are a number of ways of selling them (i.e., you’re not restricted to bookshops) but I hope to expand this into crime in the near future. Like I say, it’s a micro, one-man operation entirely dependent on the books being good, and the support of the general public.
  “And because I’m a modest kind of a guy, I’m going to call it Bateman Books.”

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

Ulster Says Noir

There’s some very interesting news over at Adrian McKinty’s (right) interweb lair, the gist of which runneth thusly:

“I am very pleased to announce the forthcoming book, BELFAST NOIR, part of the prestigious and award-winning Akashic City Noir series, the volume to be published in 2014. The book will be edited by myself and Stuart Neville and will feature the cream of Northern Ireland’s fiction writing community as well as crime writers from further afield who happen to have a Belfast connection. Confirmed for the volume so far are: Glenn Patterson, Eoin McNamee, Garbhan Downey, Lee Child, Alex Barclay, Brian McGilloway, Ian McDonald, Colin Bateman, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Claire McGowan, Tammy Moore, Lucy Caldwell, Sam Millar and Gerard Brennan. Which is a pretty impressive list I think you’ll agree.”

  I do agree, sir. Looking forward to it already …

And So To Bristol

If I’m perfectly honest about it, the only reason I go to Crimefest in Bristol is to meet the fabulous Donna Moore (right). She can be a bit of a recluse, Donna, and doesn’t venture outside her front door very often – the occasional gig, a rare excursion to buy shoes, the opening of an envelope, that kind of thing.
  Anyway, I’m off again to see Donna (and do the whole Bristol Crimefest thing) again this year, and I’m hugely looking forward to it. I’m taking part in a discussion called ‘Making Us Laugh About Murder’ on Friday afternoon, alongside Ruth Dudley Edwards, Colin Cotterill, Dorothy Cannell and moderator Lindsey Davis; and on Saturday afternoon I’ll be hosting a discussion on ‘Books to Die For’, featuring contributors to the BOOKS TO DIE FOR tome Barbara Nadel, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Colin Bateman and Brian McGilloway.
  On Saturday night, there’s the Gala Dinner and Awards Presentation, at which I hope to be seated beside Peter Rozovsky, because he’s the only one who can stop me throwing my broccoli out of my high chair. BOOKS TO DIE FOR is up for an award on Saturday night, along with some very fine books indeed; and SLAUGHTER’S HOUND has been shortlisted for the Goldsboro ‘Last Laugh’ gong, an award I was lucky enough to win last year (at least, I’m pretty sure I did – it might well have been a particularly vivid fever-dream).
  Apart from the various events, panels and official events, though, the best part of the weekend is catching up with people you tend not to see from one end of the year to the other. Much coffee will be consumed, and perhaps a glass of sherry or two, and quite a bit of hot air generated. Even the weather is promised fine. Should be a cracker. For the full Crimefest programme, clickety-click here ...

The Hound Of The Laughtervilles

I’m very pleased indeed to announce that SLAUGHTER’S HOUND has been shortlisted for the Goldsboro Last Laugh award at Crimefest. As all Three Regular Readers will be aware, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL won the Last Laugh gong at Crimefest in 2012 – I was genuinely stunned on the night in question, and very nearly left speechless, and it remains one of the proudest moments of my writing career to date.
  That’s only one of the reasons why I don’t have a hope in hell of winning the Last Laugh this year; the other is the superb quality of the other nominees. To wit:

- Colin Bateman for The Prisoner of Brenda (Headline)
- Simon Brett for The Corpse on the Court (Severn House)
- Declan Burke for Slaughter’s Hound (Liberties Press)
- Ruth Dudley Edwards for Killing The Emperors (Allison & Busby)
- Christopher Fowler for Bryant & May and the Invisible Code (Doubleday, Transworld)
- Hesh Kestin for The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (Mulholland Books, Hodder & Stoughton)

  Congratulations to all nominees, in all of the Crimefest awards categories. All the details can be found here …
  Finally, I note in passing that three of the six Last Laugh nominees are Irish. What that might or might not say about the Irish attitude to crime and / or crime fiction is anyone’s guess. But I’d love to hear your theories …

The Queen Of Kings

I had a review of Alex Barclay’s YA novel CURSE OF KINGS (HarperCollins Children’s Books) published in the Sunday Business Post a couple of weekends ago. It ran a lot like this:

“Envar was a land of twelve territories and its northeasterly was Decresian.”
  Alex Barclay’s career as an author of adult crime thrillers began with Darkhouse (2005), a novel set partly in Ireland and partly in New York. In recent years she has set her novels, which feature the FBI agent Ren Bryce, entirely in Colorado; but from the very first line of her latest offering, the young adult title Curse of Kings, we find ourselves even further from home, albeit in a place and time very far removed from the mean streets of the mystery novel.
  That’s not to say Curse of Kings wants for mystery, as the main storyline centres on young Oland Born’s quest to discover his true identity. We first meet Oland working as a servant for the vicious usurper Villius Ren, a sadist who murdered his friend and the former king, Micah, some 14 years before the story proper begins. In a pacy opening, Barclay establishes Oland’s plight as he is physically and verbally abused by Villius Ren and his cabal of dark knights, in the process dropping significant hints that Oland was not born into such a lowly status. Soon Oland finds himself in mortal danger, and he flees the kingdom of Decresian in search of the truth about his destiny. On his travels he meets Delphi, an unusual young woman who is herself in search of answers about who she is; together they find the wherewithal to face down the cruelties of Villius Ren and overcome the many trials they are forced to endure.
  There well may be a PhD out there for some enterprising student interested in discovering why so many Irish crime writers have published young adult fiction: Alex Barclay follows in the footsteps of John Connolly, Cora Harrison, Adrian McKinty, Colin Bateman and Eoin McNamee in writing for a younger audience. Perhaps the appeal lies in leaving aside for a while the crime genre’s demands for gritty realism. Here we find ourselves in the quasi-Mediaeval world of Envar, a misty, mythical place of castles and black princes, swords and shields, noble blood-lines and uncompromised morality. The back-page blurb references Tolkien but the book reads much more like an adventure-fuelled variation on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, or the minor stories of the Arthurian legends.
  That said, the novel has very contemporary resonances. Oland Born is essentially a bullied child who refuses to accept his fate, and Barclay eschews the easy option of allowing him access to magic, spells or fantastical devices that might ease his passage to freedom. Instead Oland and Delphi are forced to rely on their wit, courage and determination to succeed, which renders them all the more vulnerable and accessible to the reader, and enhances our engagement with their struggle.
  Or struggles, rather. Events unfold at a very rapid pace, and the story is jammed to the margins with incident, reversals of fortune, surprise reveals and confrontations. Indeed, there are times when the adult reader might be a little overwhelmed by the relentless buffeting Oland and Delphi experience, although the target audience of younger readers will very probably remained gripped throughout.
  The first of a planned trilogy, Curse of Kings is a handsome achievement, not least in terms of its creation of a new world that comes fully terra-formed with a unique history, religion, geography and civilisation. There is darkness here, and monsters both animal and human, but Barclay never loses sight of the fact that our folktales and fairytales were constructed to facilitate our instinctive desire to believe that no matter how bleak our lives appear to be, a better world is ours for the taking. – Declan Burke

  This review first appeared in the Sunday Business Post

Northern Lights

Colin Bateman and Eoin McNamee were two of the notable exceptions, but for many years Northern Ireland crime novelists steered clear of writing about ‘the Troubles’. Now a new generation of crime writers has begun to engage with that historical period and its violence, among them Claire McGowan, Adrian McKinty, Brian McGilloway and Anthony Quinn. I had a feature on the subject published in the Irish Examiner last Saturday, which opened up like this:

“The riot had taken on a beauty of its own,” begins Adrian McKinty’s novel The Cold Cold Ground, outlining in those few spare words why so many Northern Irish authors have recently turned to writing about the Troubles.
  Published in 2011, the novel was the first of a new series by McKinty, which features a Catholic RUC policeman operating in Belfast in 1981. As the terrible beauty of the opening page’s chaos gives way to the violence surrounding the hunger strikes, and the story broadens out to detail the province-wide paranoia and social unrest, the bombings and the murders, you start to wonder why it has taken so long for Northern Irish crime writers to embrace the Troubles as a setting.
  “I think, ultimately, crime fiction works best as a vicarious experience of crime, with the sense that there will be justice in some form,” says Derry-born author Brian McGilloway. “For many years there was no need to experience it vicariously, as it was happening for real. More than that, though, the idea of justice was a ridiculous one when it so clearly wasn’t happening in real life.”
  McGilloway writes a series of detective novels featuring Inspector Ben Devlin, a Donegal-based Garda who liaises with his counterpart across the border in the PSNI. While the novels have always dealt with post-Troubles scenarios, last year’s offering, The Nameless Dead, found Devlin resurrecting a case from the 1970s.
  Claire McGowan’s debut novel, The Fall (2012), was set in London. Her second offering, The Lost, is set in her native Newry, and concerns itself with a pair of missing girls, whose disappearance mirrors that of two girls who vanished in 1985.
  “I always think about something Ian Rankin said years ago,” she says, “that there was very little northern Irish crime fiction because the pain and violence was all too recent. We weren’t ready then to fictionalise it. I’d imagine people felt worried about engaging too directly with the powerful interests in society. It’s something I still worry about now.”
  Anthony Quinn, whose debut Disappeared was published last year, agrees. “During the Troubles many of us walked a tightrope with the IRA at one end and the British Army and Loyalist paramilitaries at the other. You had to be careful about what you said and wrote. Words could kill. If you said the wrong thing, you might never be seen again. The phrase ‘and whatever you say, say nothing’ was a mantra for survival.”
  McKinty, meanwhile, believes that an entire generation was so traumatised by the experience of the Troubles that it was shocked into silence.
  “No one wants to talk about it in these terms,” he says, “but it’s my belief that the whole of society in Northern Ireland is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. A war that lasted 30 years and impacted every walk of life and is still rumbling away in the background is going to leave deep and painful scars.”
  There were crime novelists who explored the consequences of the conflict while the Troubles were ongoing – Colin Bateman and Eoin McNamee spring to mind, along with thriller writers such as Gerald Seymour and Jack Higgins – but in recent years a growing number of younger writers have begun to incorporate their experiences of growing up through the Troubles into their stories.
  “Now, I think, the Troubles can be considered with a degree of distance and can be explored with intelligence and insight rather than being exploited for sensationalist entertainment, which was the case with many of the Troubles books of that period,” suggests McGilloway. “I think that’s what made it off-limits for so long – the sense that you didn’t want to exploit real pain and suffering.”
  Time and distance has also allowed some writers to come to terms with the anomalies of living through what the Chinese proverb euphemistically describes as ‘interesting times’.
  “For my own part, Disappeared allowed me to shine a light upon some deep contradictions in my own experience of the Troubles,” says Quinn. “My family were held at gunpoint by the IRA and our car hijacked in a murder bid on a policeman. We suffered intimidation and abuse. For instance, we were given a bullet by the IRA which was destined for my father if he contacted the police before a certain time. We were cowed into silence. Writing the book allowed me the chance to break this silence as well as explore the contradictory sense of being terrorised by the IRA and at the same time protected and somehow energised by them.”
  Claire McGowan also sees fiction as a means of giving voice to her conflicted childhood.
  “It’s a way of dealing with the past, and showing the wider world how things were for us,” she says. “I was born in 1981 and grew up through some very bad years, and I always struggle to explain to non-Irish friends what it was really like, how frightened we often were as children.”
  “The conspiracy of silence about the Troubles is what attracted me to writing about it in the first place,” says McKinty. “If you’re a writer and you take your job seriously you should be exploring regions that no one wants you to go into. You should be diving deep into the fractures and seeing what it was that made people act that way.”
  It’s possible for writers to play their part in a kind of reconciliation process, argues McGowan, by acknowledging that contemporary Northern Ireland is a compelling setting, and embracing its potential rather than ignoring its past.
  “For me it’s the aspect of living in a post-conflict society, where appalling events are still so fresh in the mind,” she says, “but we’re all supposed to wipe the slate clean and live alongside the perpetrators. What’s most amazing is how many people are willing to do this for the sake of peace.”
  “Even now, post-ceasefire, Northern Ireland is still a place in turmoil, emotionally and politically, as the Union Jack protests demonstrate,” says Quinn. “Swift political changes and inverted values have driven former terrorists into power, and to have this as a backdrop adds great dramatic tension and resonance to your writing, especially when you set individuals on a personal struggle between good and bad.”
  McGilloway also believes the crime novel has an important part to play in the cultural future of Northern Ireland.
  “Fiction has always provided a way to reflect on the concerns of society, and to allow the writer to tease out various scenarios,” he says. “I think the distance that the Peace Process has provided has allowed that to happen much more successfully. There’s a case of not being able to see the wood for the trees when you’re in the centre of things.”
  For Anthony Quinn, writing about the Troubles also provides a perspective on the present that isn’t necessarily politically correct.
  “One of the consequences of breaking this silence and writing about the Troubles,” he says, “and in particular the post-ceasefire society of Northern Ireland, is that it exposes the cracks in the harmonious, peaceful new society dreamed of in the Good Friday Agreement. But I believe Irish readers are now better able to tolerate these flaws.
  “Our politicians lie and dissemble,” he adds, “and historical documents can be subjective and flawed, but at least fiction never pretends to be anything else.”
  For writers, and artists of every kind, there is the not inconsiderable challenge of overcoming the historic resistance to Troubles-set drama.
  “The Troubles are an unpopular topic,” acknowledges McKinty, “but the events of the Troubles are so dark and heroic and perverse and mundane that to me at least they’re almost irresistible. It’s true that my book sales are a tiny fraction of other writers who wisely steer clear of these messy waters but I do think this period needs to be looked at by poets and novelists and film makers. Eventually the public will come round to seeing that too.”

  This feature was first published in the Irish Examiner.

A Fall For Springtime

At this rate I’m never going to be on trend. Jane Casey is the latest Irish crime scribe to turn her hand to writing young adult novels with HOW TO FALL (Corgi), following in the footsteps of John Connolly, Eoin McNamee, Cora Harrison, Colin Bateman and Adrian McKinty - and I’m reliably informed that two more of our high profile authors will be publishing YA titles in 2013. (Eoin Colfer, of course, being obstreperous and from Wexford, moved in the other direction, from writing YA to adult crime).
  I’d love to write a children’s book, but I’d imagine it’s a very difficult thing to get right, especially if you can’t allow your characters swear like stevedores when you run out of polite things for them to say.
  Anyway, HOW TO FALL will be published at the end of January, with the blurb elves wibbling thusly:

When fifteen-year-old Freya drowns, everyone assumes she’s killed herself, but no-one knows why. Her cousin, Jess Tennant, thinks she was murdered - and is determined to uncover the truth. On a summer visit to sleepy Port Sentinel, Jess (who bears a striking resemblance to her dead cousin) starts asking questions - questions that provoke strong reactions from her friends and family, not to mention Freya’s enemies. Everyone is hiding something - and Freya herself had more than her fair share of secrets. Can Jess unravel the mystery of her cousin’s death? A mystery involving a silver locket, seething jealousy and a cliff-top in the pitch black of night?

  Sounds like a cracker. There’s an early review of HOW TO FALL over at Chicklish (“Reader, I snogged him!”) which augurs well …

The Canadian-Italian Job

Recently returned from Caen University, where he featured - along with The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman and Declan Hughes - in a weekend-long conference on Irish crime fiction, the very fine scribe Cormac Millar continues his international bridge-building by welcoming Canadian-Italian author Antonio Nicaso (right) to Dublin’s Trinity College on Monday, December 3rd.
  A renowned Mafia expert, Nicaso will be giving a talk on ‘Mafia: Fiction and Reality’, which incorporates the international phenomenon of organized crime and not just the Italian variety.
  The event takes place in the Robert Emmet Theatre, Arts Building, Trinity College at 7:15pm on the evening of Monday 3 December 2012. For more about Antonio Nicaso, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” JJ Toner

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?
PERFUME by Patrick Suskind, a totally wonderful and original story told as a fable. If I have to choose an Irish book: Colin Bateman’s MYSTERY MAN or THE BUTCHER BOY by Patrick McCabe, or any of Gene Kerrigan’s books, or ...

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
I have a long list, starting with Philip Marlowe, Indiana Jones and, for the quieter moments, George Smiley.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Colin Bateman, Christopher Brookmyre, John Le Carré, Declan Burke (!), Gene Kerrigan, etc. It’s all guilty pleasure, really!

Most satisfying writing moment?
When a book is released and sent out into the world. My latest book, FIND EMILY, took 49 weeks to complete. There were nine major rewrites. I have a wonderful editor, but I think she trained with the Spanish Inquisition.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
DARK TIMES IN THE CITY by Gene Kerrigan. This is a wonderful book, with a stunningly well-crafted plot and great writing.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
PLUGGED by Eoin Colfer, maybe.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Best thing: I love it when an idea first arrives and even more when the idea becomes a written short story. Better again is when someone says they want to include it in an anthology (and I’ll get paid). Worst thing: Lack of exercise.

The pitch for your next book is …?
1096 AD, Brittany. While a killer preys on boys and young men, two teenagers join the Crusade. They must endure a long, difficult journey to the Holy Land before facing the perils of battle, but at least they’ve left the serial killer behind – or have they? I wrote this book years ago. Time to dust it off, do a major rewrite or two and get it out there.

Who are you reading right now?
Joe McCoubrey’s SOMEONE HAS TO PAY, BEAT TO A PULP: HARDBOILED, A JUNE OF ORDINARY MURDERS by Conor Brady, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL and several others (mostly e-books).

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
No contest. I’d have to be a reader. There are too many great writers out there and I need the exercise!

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Fun, idiosyncratic, idiomatic (who said “idiotic”?).

JJ Toner’s FIND EMILY is available on Amazon.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Thomas Mogford

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?
DIRTY TRICKS by Michael Dibdin. A stand-alone novel, rather than one of the ‘Zen’ series, it pulls off the near-impossible trick of making a thoroughly reprehensible main character utterly likeable. As someone who was brought up in Oxford, and has taught more than his fair share of foreign language classes, I felt a worrying sense of solidarity when the venal owner of language school receives a rather shocking comeuppance ...

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Keith Talent from Martin Amis’s LONDON FIELDS. Indefatigability and darts skills.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t often feel guilty about reading books. Free magazines and certain online newspapers, maybe…

Most satisfying writing moment?
When my wife reads something I’ve written, and doesn’t have a hint of a look that says ‘This could be better …’.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
DIVORCING JACK by Colin Bateman. My wife’s family are from Belfast, and this book convinced me that at any point while visiting them I would be kidnapped and trussed-up in a tower block. Still hasn’t happened, unfortunately …

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Irish-written, rather than Irish-set, but THE DOGS OF ROME by Conor Fitzgerald. Dog fights, mafia double dealings, all with the shimmering seedy backdrop of Rome… I’d buy a multiplex ticket for that.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The best thing is experiencing a scene as you write it in a way that is almost as intense as living it. The worst is the crippling sense of uncertainty as to whether that scene is any good.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Gibraltarian lawyer Spike Sanguinetti travels to Malta after the deaths of his uncle and aunt. What appears to be a blood-soaked murder-suicide turns out a great deal more dark and sinister…

Who are you reading right now?
An English translation of the crime novel BRENNER AND GOD by Wolf Haas. Gives the lie to the fact that German-speakers can’t be funny and cool.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I think write, so as to try and pen poems to persuade Him to increase our daily rations of manna.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
The Times called SHADOW OF THE ROCK, ‘Evocative, engrossing and entertaining’, so if I can be forgiven the hideous self-promotion, I’ll go for that.

Thomas Mogford’s SHADOW OF THE ROCK is published by Bloomsbury