The Growth Economy

Journalist and non-fiction author Michael Clifford made his crime fiction debut last year with GHOST TOWN, and a very fine piece of work it was too. He returns this year with THE DEAL (Hachette Ireland), with the blurb elves wibbling thusly:

Karen Riney is a young woman desperate to put bad memories behind her and get back on her feet when she hits upon an idea to make fast money. In the depths of a recession, there’s no business like the grow house business. But getting her venture off the ground requires some assistance. Enter Paschal Nix, a Dublin crime lord with a fearsome reputation. Nix provides more than money for the deal by throwing in the services of out-of-work builder Kevin Wyman, who is up to his ears in hoc to Nix and grappling with serious personal problems. He also dispatches hitman-for-hire Dara Burns to keep an eye on the investment, a man who’s fiercely guarding his back in a world where life is cheap. All have their eyes on one prize: a quick killing. But as Karen Riney soon learns, when you’re in over your head, there’s no such thing as easy money. THE DEAL is a gripping, blind-siding tale of greed, revenge and the price of survival.

  I’ve yet to see a copy, but I’m reliably informed that THE DEAL is in the shops as we speak. If it’s on a par with GHOST TOWN, it will be one of the best Irish crime novels of the year.

Do You Remember The Good Old Days Before The GHOST TOWN?

A fine old time was had last Wednesday night at the Hodges Figgis ‘Crime Night’, and very nice it was to meet with some familiar names, and put faces to said names. It was a tidy turn-out, too, and I sincerely hope that everyone who turned up enjoyed it as much as I did. Most enjoyable, perhaps, was the fact that the evening’s moderator, Professor Ian Campbell-Ross, declared yours truly the ‘senior member’ of a panel that included Arlene Hunt and Conor Brady, which was the first and very probably the last time I’ll be referred to as such in the presence of an ex-Irish Times editor.
  One person I didn’t get to speak with, unfortunately, was Michael Clifford, who was there on the night but who slipped away very quickly at the end. Which is a shame, because Michael Clifford is yet another Irish crime fiction debutant, with GHOST TOWN (Hachette Ireland) due in May. Herewith be the blurb elves:

A Dublin gangland king pin on the chase. A corrupt property mogul on the run. A hungry crime journalist determined to put his destroyed career back on track. And the return of the ‘Dancer’ - Joshua Molloy, small-time Dublin ex-con, recently out of prison, off the booze, determined to stay on the straight and narrow. When Molloy hires Noelle Higgins, a solicitor and boom-time wife with a crumbling personal life, to help find his young son, both are soon drawn into a web of treachery and violence, where Ireland’s criminal underworld and fallen elite fight it out to lay claim to what’s left from the crash: €3 million in cash, in a bag, buried somewhere in the depths of rural Ireland. From Dublin to Spain and finally a debris-strewn ghost estate in Kerry, GHOST TOWN is the fast-paced and tightly written debut thriller by leading Irish journalist and commentator Michael Clifford.

  Clifford is one of Ireland’s most respected journalists and commentators, currently writing for the Irish Examiner and the Sunday Times, and the author of some non-fiction books in the recent past: LOVE YOU TO DEATH: IRELAND’S WIFE KILLERS REVEALED and (as co-author) BERTIE AHERN AND THE DRUMCONDRA MAFIA and SCANDAL NATION. Mark it down on your calendar, folks - GHOST TOWN is a very intriguing prospect indeed …
  Incidentally, Clifford isn’t the only Irish writer to trade in ghost estates for his fiction, with Tana French and Rob Kitchin’s latest offerings also employing the abandoned developments literally and figuratively. “Speak,” as Hamlet might have said were he wandering around the desolate wastelands of suburban Ireland, “I am bound to hear …”

Ghosts In The Machine

So there we were, all ready to give Colin Bateman’s (right) – oops, sorry, Bateman’s – latest the big-up hup-ya, when news arrived via a distinctly dishevelled carrier pigeon that the opus will not, after all, be called GHOST TOWN. Boo. Quoth Master Bateman:

“Those many, many hundreds of thousands of you feverishly waiting for the next novel, GHOST TOWN, may tear up your cheques and cancel your Amazon orders. Fear not though – it’s only a change of title. All the way through writing it I called it ORPHEUS RISING and it was only on delivery that my publishers thought that was a bit unwieldy and we came up with GHOST TOWN instead. So ever since that’s what it has been – I actually have the cover for the book in the house (will that be worth something on Ebay? £5? Maybe £10) – but now for reasons which are a bit complicated, and at a very late stage, at least in publishing terms, we’re back to ORPHEUS RISING. Actually – and this has nothing to do with the title change, because it would actually have been quite helpful – the new film from Ricky Gervais, his first leading role, is also called GHOST TOWN, also set in America, and has quite a similar plot. I was looking forward to the confusion this would have caused, because he is an international superstar and comedy genius, and I still play five-a-side.”

And modest too, eh? ORPHEUS RISING (GHOST TOWN cover slightly modified by the elves after a hard night on the Elf-Wonking Juice™, right) enters the stratosphere on March 6, with the hard-pressed elves blurbing thusly:

Michael met Claire when she was dragging Paul de Luca, detective novel writer and owner of a porn shop, out of the sea after he’d lost his feet in a shark attack. Claire was living with local hard man Tommy, a Gulf War vet, at the time and Tommy was not impressed with Michael’s interest in his girl. When Tommy leaves town to be a roadie for a band playing a six-week stint on a cruise ship, Michael falls in love with Claire, they marry and he writes his novel. But then Claire is killed in the bank raid. Ten years later Michael returns to the scene of the crime to exorcise the ghosts of the past and try to write his second novel. But he discovers the grim truth behind his wife’s murder and encounters the strangest of small-town behaviour ...

The subtitle? ‘Love, Rockets and a Bloody Great Fish’. All together now: “We’re gonna need a bigger bookshelf …”