On The Road

Brian McCabe, a friend of a friend – or a friend of a neighbour, to be precise – has just self-published a novel, THE STONEY ROAD, which should appeal to fans of Kevin McCarthy’s work. Quoth the blurb elves:

As Ireland begins her difficult, troubled journey towards independence, the Berford and McNeill families find themselves struggling with upheavals of their own. These two families are brought together by marriage and then torn apart by death, war and loss. THE STONEY ROAD chronicles a city in turmoil as a country tries to find itself. Crowds line up to welcome the king to Dublin, but rumblings of rebellion can already be felt in the dark alleys and smokey pubs. Soon people will have to decide whether to be loyal to their past or embrace an uncertain, dangerous future.
  Between 1900 and 1922, the very idea of Irishness was redefined. A new nation emerged from the rubble of war. And two families had to find their own roads out of the ruins.

  What caught my eye on this one is the Introduction, which is written by one of the great pioneers of the Irish crime writing boom, Eugene McEldowney. “The author has set himself an ambitious project but he acquits himself with distinction,” writes Eugene. “He brings to the task an intimate knowledge of the geography and history of his native city and makes it come vividly alive for the reader.”
  For more, clickety-click here …

The Dial Code Was … Death!

First published in 1997, DEATH CALL by TS O’Rourke was one of the earliest of the modern Irish noirs. In common with some other Irish crime writers of the time - Vincent Banville, Ingrid Black, Eugene McEldowney, Jim Lusby, Seamus Smyth - O’Rourke was probably a little too far ahead of the curve, and the first phase of his career could probably be characterised by the old maxim about pioneers, who tend to get shot, and generally in the back.
  Happily, TS O’Rourke is a hard man to kill, in the literary sense, and he has recently begun publishing again. Not only that, but he has just republished DEATH CALL, with the blurb elves wibbling thusly:

It was all he could do to stop his hangover from spilling out onto the victim as he studied her neck and what he made out to be the initial puncture wound in her abdomen. From that point, he thought, she had been opened like an envelope with a paper knife, revealing a mess of entrails and blood.
  With a deranged serial killer on the loose, Detective Sergeant Dan Carroll and his new partner Detective Constable Samuel Grant find themselves trawling the seedy side of London in search of a brutal killer who preys on prostitutes.

  For all the info you need on TS O’Rourke’s novels, new and otherwise, take a wee wander over to his interweb lair …

The Bateman Cometh

Yours truly has a piece in the current Crimespree Magazine about yon handsome devil Colin Bateman (right), and it runneth thusly:

No Man Left Behind: Colin Bateman’s DIVORCING JACK

“I was upstairs with a girl I shouldn’t have been upstairs with when my wife whispered in my ear. ‘You have twenty-four hours to move out.’”
  Colin Bateman, Divorcing Jack

In the rush to celebrate John Connolly, Ken Bruen, Tana French, Declan Hughes and all the other leading lights of the current explosion in Irish crime fiction, one name is notable by its absence, in the U.S. at least.
  Colin Bateman (or simply ‘Bateman’, according to last year’s re-branding) didn’t kick-start the current vogue for Irish crime writing – Patrick McGinley published Bogmail back in 1978, for example, while crime novels by Vincent McDonnell, Bartholomew Gill, S.J. Michaels, Jim Lusby, Eugene McEldowney, Jack Holland and Peter Cunningham were all in print before Bateman’s debut, DIVORCING JACK, appeared in 1995.
  But what Bateman achieved with Divorcing Jack was phenomenal. Not only did he advance the notion that Irish crime fiction could be both popular and profitable, particularly when the movie of the same name, starring David Thewlis and Rachel Griffiths, appeared in 1998, he managed the nigh-impossible: a comedy crime narrative set in war-torn Belfast at the height of ‘the Troubles’.
  His hero – and I use the term loosely – is Dan Starkey, a cynical, wise-cracking alcoholic journalist who gets sucked into a murder mystery when a drunken encounter with a young woman, Margaret, comes to an abrupt end when Margaret is murdered. It’s not a unique set-up, and neither is Starkey a unique character. What made DIVORCING JACK such a trail-blazer was its backdrop, the meaner-than-mean streets of Belfast.
  McEldowney, Holland, Cunningham and Michaels had all set their crime narratives with ‘the Troubles’ for a backdrop, but Bateman was different.
  If this guy can generate a contemporary, relevant and – crucially – funny novel in that setting, thought a hundred wannabe writers, then what’s stopping me?
  That’s certainly the thought that occurred to me over and over again as I read it.
  Ireland, you see, takes its books very seriously. From an early age Irish writers are acutely aware of the burden of responsibility of living up to the legacy of Joyce, Beckett, Shaw, O’Casey, et al. For such a small country, Ireland has had a disproportionate number of Nobel Prize winners for literature. And for a young writer, that’s a hell of a Swedish monkey on your back.
  Colin Bateman offered a way out. DIVORCING JACK was rooted in Belfast the way Samson and Goliath are, those cranes that rear up out of the Harland and Wolff shipyards to tower above the city and testify to Belfast’s past as an industrial hub of the British Empire. Starkey, born, bred and buttered in Belfast, was nonetheless a creature of his time, aware of the potential for irony in the ongoing conflict, and – again, crucially – acutely aware of his cultural heritage as a reluctant private eye.
  He was quintessentially Irish in his attitudes, his dialogue and his predilection for gloom and despair. But he was fuelled and informed by the American crime novel and movie, particularly the pulp noir of Cain and Thompson, Chandler and Leonard.
  Bateman wasn’t simply mocking the prejudices of Belfast, or those of the stuffy literary set for whom a novel wasn’t a novel without at least one ineluctable modality to its name. He seemed to be mocking Irishness itself, that narcissistic and self-defeating sense of parochial self-importance that had hobbled and blinkered one generation after another.
  Some might argue that perhaps that attitude of self-celebration was a necessary reaction to centuries of colonial oppression. ‘The English gave us a language,’ ran the Irish saying, ‘and we gave them back a literature’. Of course, as is almost inevitably the case, the arrogance masked a debilitating inferiority complex.
  DIVORCING JACK struck a defiant note. It was Irish, certainly, and unmistakably and hilariously so; Dan Starkey is one of the great rebels of Irish writing. Intrinsic to his cultural hinterland, and yet wearing his country’s recent history like a hair-shirt, his is a prickly, goading, questioning voice. And the most important question is the implicit one, the question that informs the entire subtext of DIVORCING JACK: why did Irish crime writers take it as an article of faith that they weren’t good enough to compete on an international level?
  It should be noted too that DIVORCING JACK is a courageous novel. It’s a little easier now to poke fun at the tensions that caused the ‘the Troubles’, and at the paramilitaries on both sides who bombed and tortured an entire generation. But the novel appeared the year before the great watershed of the first IRA ceasefire of the interminably long ‘Peace Process’, at a time when irony was in very scare supply on the streets of Belfast.
  In doing so it blazed a wide trail down which many followed, among them your humble correspondent. DIVORCING JACK gave me the confidence to set EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, a Chandler homage, in a small Irish town, and to use the demilitarisation of Northern Ireland’s paramilitaries, and their diversification into more prosaic crime, as a backdrop.
  Colin Bateman has had a long and successful career in Ireland and the UK; excluding his YA novels, and his prolific output for TV, he has had 18 novels published. He failed to ‘take’ in the U.S. during the mid- to late-nineties, but perhaps the U.S. simply wasn’t ready then for an Irish blend of Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler and Carl Hiassen.
  He is long overdue a serious reappraisal. – Declan Burke

This article was first published in Crimespree Magazine.

Saints, Scholars, Cops And Killers

Given that it’s Paddy’s Day (hic), and we’re supposed to be celebrating Irishness in all its wonderful manifestations (the lovely caílín, right, being a prime example), Crime Always Pays would like to take this opportunity to direct your attention to some Irish crime writers that we believe were woefully neglected in years gone by. To wit, and in no particular order:

Seamus Smyth: “This is not just a great crime novel, it’s one hell of a novel, full stop. QUINN should be THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE for this decade, it’s that good and fresh and innovative.” – Ken Bruen

Eugene McEldowney: “The novel was a reaction to some of the awful books that had been written about Northern Ireland and which made no effort to place the political violence in any kind of context.” – Dublin Quarterly

Vincent Banville: John Blaine was the original hardboiled Irish private eye. He may yet sue Declan Hughes for being younger and thus better placed to capitalise on Ireland’s newly minted mean streets.

Philip Davison: “Part le Carré, part Graham Greene … thoroughly compelling… cracking dialogue.” – The Independent. “Each word in this bleakly humorous novel promises to explode and bring light to the shadows … Davison never fails to surprise, compel and intrigue with dry philosophy and grim wit.” - The Times Literary Supplement

TS O’Rourke: “History is written in stone. I know that history is also written by the victor, but the truth, the whole story of these terrible times, is now emerging and I have tried to present at least a small picture of what the Civil War was like for a foot soldier, a volunteer, in Dublin City.” – Dublin Quarterly

There’s many more, of course, but right now we’re blogging from the pub and some amateur has just spilled a pint of green beer onto our laptop and fhizz signal seems to be crrssshsprcklefrtz … Arrah, bollocks. Hic. Another bucket of porter there, Jamesey, and don’t shpare the horshes …