BOOKS TO DIE FOR: And So It Begins

“Why does the mystery novel enjoy such enduring appeal? There is no simple answer. It has a distinctive capacity for subtle social commentary; a concern with the distinction between law and justice; and a passion for order, however compromised. Even in the vision of the darkest of mystery writers, it provides us with a glimpse of the world as it might be, a world in which good men and women do not stand idly by and allow the worst aspects of human nature to triumph without opposition. It can touch upon all these aspects of itself while still entertaining the reader – and its provision of entertainment is not the least of its good qualities.
  But the mystery novel has always prized character over plot, which may come as some surprise to its detractors. True, this is not a universal tenet: there are degrees to which mysteries occupy themselves with the identity of the criminal as opposed to, say, the complexities of human motivation. Some, such as the classic puzzle mystery, tend towards the former; others are more concerned with the latter. But the mystery form understands that plot comes out of character, and not just that: it believes that the great mystery is character.”

  So begins the Introduction to BOOKS TO DIE FOR. Co-edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke, the book asks 120 of the world’s best contemporary crime and mystery writers which book they believe should be included in the great canon of crime and mystery fiction.
  The response was astonishing, and the list of contributors reads like a veritable Who’s Who of modern crime and mystery authors - Michael Connelly, Sara Paretsky, Elmore Leonard, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, James Sallis, Mark Billingham, Kathy Reichs, Karin Slaughter, Jo Nesbo, Peter James, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, Sophie Hannah, Joseph Wambaugh, Tana French, David Peace, Laura Lippman, Deon Meyer, Colin Bateman, Megan Abbott, Linwood Barclay, Laura Wilson and John Banville are only some of the names involved.
  The book is published by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK on August 30th, and by Atria / Emily Bestler Books in the US on October 2nd. If you’re on Facebook, you can clickety-click here for daily updates on content, contributors, and plenty of extras.
  Some of the key launch dates on this side of the pond have already been lined up, and I’ll be updating this post on a regular basis to keep you informed as to further developments. In the meantime, if you’re anywhere near any of the venues below, we’d love to see you there …

Monday, August 6 at 6:00 p.m.
South Africa Launch of BOOKS TO DIE FOR with John Connolly, Deon Meyer, Mike Nicol and Margie Orford
The Book Lounge
71 Roeland St.
Cape Town, South Africa
RSVP: 021 462 2424 or booklounge@gmail.com

Thursday, August 30 at 6:30 p.m.
Belfast launch of BOOKS TO DIE FOR (and THE WRATH OF ANGELS by John Connolly and SLAUGHTER’S HOUND by Declan Burke)
The Ulster Museum
Botanic Gardens, Belfast
Tickets Available from No Alibis Bookstore – free event!
44 (0) 28 9031 9601
Email: david@noalibis.com

Thursday, September 6 at 6:30 p.m.
Dublin launch of BOOKS TO DIE FOR
Dubray Books Grafton Street
36 Grafton Street
Dublin 2
(01) 677 5568
dublinbookshop@dubraybooks.ie

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Margie Orford

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?
WOLVES EAT DOGS by Martin Cruz Smith.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Arkady Renko (goes with the above). But some days I feel more like Cruella deVille. I never want to be Bambi’s mother.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
The Guardian.

Most satisfying writing moment?
My first royalty check.

The best South African crime novel is …?
THIRTEEN HOURS by Deon Meyer.

What South African crime novel would make a great movie?
THIRTEEN HOURS will be a great movie – it is in production right now. And I think BLOOD ROSE, my second novel, which is busy being cast right now, won’t be too shabby either. As one of the producers told me, with true producer tact: ‘We like your South African stuff – it’s like Wallander with good weather.’ Who could argue with that?

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Few people think you actually do any work (the worst thing). Being able to nap at your desk (which is probably why people think you don’t work).

The pitch for your next book is …?
Isolde Wagner, a gifted but vulnerable young woman drops out of her life, leaving behind friends, family and career as a classical musician to join a reclusive sect. After she cuts all ties, her anxious mother asks Clare Hart to find her, to persuade her to make contact. But Clare is not sure if Isolde is alive or dead and whoever has had a hand in her vanishing does not want the truth revealed.

Who are you reading right now?
ALL ABOUT LOVE: ANATOMY OF AN UNRULY EMOTION by Lisa Appignanesi (there are very few crimes that don’t have their origin in love).

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I’ve taken God on before and I came out alright, so I think I would challenge him to an arm-wrestle. I win – I get to write AND read. He wins – well, I get to rewrite his book. There are a couple of bits I think could do with some tweaking.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
One reviewer said my writing induced ‘ball-crushing fear’ - I’m happy with that.

Margie Orford’s DADDY’S GIRL is published by Atlantic Books.

The World: Gone To Hell In A Hand-Basket, Apparently

I had a piece published in the Irish Times yesterday, the gist of it concerned with the development of the crime novel in settings and countries not necessarily associated with the traditional haunts of crime fiction. To wit:

How the World Became One Big Crime Scene

From the Palestinian Territories to Mongolia and beyond, crime writers are using international locations to tackle global themes

The popular perception of crime fiction is that it’s the foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, black sheep of the literary family. Unsurprisingly, it’s quite popular with the ladies, perhaps as a result of the broad mind it has developed on its travels.
  The success of Stieg Larsson’s Sweden-set ‘Millennium Trilogy’ has alerted mainstream readers to the fact that the crime novel has an existence beyond its traditional enclaves of America and the UK. Larsson, of course, is following in the footsteps of his countryman Henning Mankell, while ‘foreign’ settings for crime novels are nothing new for aficionados au fait with the groundbreaking works of Georges Simenon (France) and Sjöwall and Wahlöö (Sweden), and latterly the likes of Andrea Camilleri (Italy), Colin Cotterill (Cambodia), Michael Dibdin (Italy), Jo Nesbø (Norway) and Deon Meyer (South Africa), to mention but a few.
  Three years ago, writing in the New Yorker, Clive James celebrated international crime fiction offerings from Ireland, Scandinavia and Italy while simultaneously deriding the limitations of the genre’s form. “In most of the crime novels coming out now,” he said, “it’s a matter not of what happens but of where. Essentially, they are guide books.”
  What James failed to recognise is that the crime novel, by virtue of engaging with issues of law and (dis)order in a timely and relevant fashion, tends to be at the cutting edge in terms of addressing society’s fundamental concerns and broaching its taboos.
  Per Wahlöö, for example, claimed that the motive behind the ten-book Martin Beck series written with his wife was to “use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type.”
  Peeling back layers of cant and perceived wisdom is a theme that writers are currently exploring in settings as diverse as Canada, Poland, the Palestinian Territories, Brazil, South Africa and Mongolia.
  “Toronto has been proud of its label as one the most multi-ethnic cities in the world for the past twenty years or so,” says John McFetridge (right), whose Let It Ride is set in Canada’s great melting-pot city. “There’s been some great literature written here, but there hasn’t been much written about crime. And there’s been plenty of crime. Almost everything in my books is inspired by real events, from the closed brewery turned into a giant marijuana grow-op to the beauty queen pulling armed robberies at spas, to eight members of a gang killed in one night. I wanted to write what I saw going on in my city that not many people were talking about.”
  Mike Nicol, the author of Killer Country, is one of a new breed of South African writers inspired by Deon Meyer. “During apartheid the only fiction was literary fiction,” he says. “It was believed to have the seriousness that our political condition demanded. So there was no crime fiction – or almost none, although there were some very good novels from James McClure and Wessel Ebersohn.
  “After the end of Nelson Mandela’s presidency in 1999 it became obvious that the new government wasn’t terribly different from the old government. Apartheid was gone but the politicians remained politicians. There was widespread cronyism, fraud, corruption, embezzlement within government, collusion between cops and gangsters, a collapse in the education system, a collapse in the health sector as AIDS denialism became a national policy, and an unhealthy relationship developed between the private sector and the public sector that was a mixture of threat and bribery. As a crime writer, I felt I was back in business.”
  Matt Benyon Rees (right), a journalist, sets his Omar Yussef series of novels in the Palestinian Territories in order to humanise the newspaper headlines. “I wanted to show the Palestinians - whom we all think we know from daily news reports - as they are and to make readers realize that they didn’t really know them at all. Detective fiction is perfect for such a manoeuvre because it requires readers to examine very closely what’s happening in the story - there’s not much room for gloss. When it’s placed in a foreign culture, the reader’s attention has to be that much closer and the writer has to look again at every element of his descriptions.
  “Fiction, strangely, is a much better way of getting at the truths of a foreign culture than political analysis,” he continues. “Politics and journalism are based around liars and those who observe liars at work but often neglect to point out that the liars are lying. Fiction can’t lie.”
  The classic dramatic conflict between have and have-nots forms the backdrop to Leighton Gage’s Chief Inspector Mario Silva novels, which are set in Brazil.
  “Brazil is a rich country,” he says, “but it’s still a developing country. As such, it continues to have highly inequitable income distribution. That’s changing, and changing rapidly, but it’s still true that this country’s taboos (unlike the ones Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler et al had to contend with) can vary immensely depending upon where you stand in the socioeconomic pecking order. Forcing one of your children into prostitution is repugnant, for example, but there’s no taboo against it if the alternative is to let your other children starve.
  “That’s an extreme case, obviously, but Brazil is full of societal issues that don’t arise in so-called First World countries. Liberation theology, for example, has been condemned by the Princes of the Church, but many of Brazil’s poorer priests practice it. Excessive concentration on the promise of reward in heaven, they say, often propagates social injustice on earth. So, at one end of the scale, a defence of liberation theology is taboo. And, at the other end, not embracing it is equally taboo. How could I possibly live here, be a writer, and not want to tell people what a fascinating place this is?”
  Michael Walters sets his Nergui novels in the former Soviet satellite of Mongolia.
  “I’m not exactly exploring ‘societal taboos’,” he says, “but writing about a society which is still in the process of trying to work out exactly what its values (and therefore taboos) ought to be. The relationship between ‘legality’ and ‘morality’ is sometimes far from clear. In my first book, for example, I was trying to work out the links between individual murder and corporate crime, and the way in which, in a society desperate for economic growth, the corporations can sometimes, maybe even literally, get away with murder. In my second, I was looking to explore the difficulty of trying to establish legitimate law enforcement in a society where corruption is endemic and, historically, the word ‘police’ has usually been preceded by the word ‘secret’.”
  “In a pretentious mode,” Walters says, “I’d quote the line from Gramsci: ‘The old is dying, the new is struggling to be born and in the period of interregnum there arise many morbid symptoms.’ That’s a pretty good description of some aspects of Mongolia. The ‘morbid symptoms’, of course, make perfect material for crime fiction.” - Declan Burke

  This feature first appeared in the Irish Times.