Publication: BOOKS TO DIE FOR, ed. John Connolly and Declan Burke

I’m delighted to say that BOOKS TO DIE FOR, originally published in 2012, will be reissued in trade paperback by its UK publishers, Hodder & Stoughton, on September 25th. Quoth the blurb elves:

Winner of the 2013 Agatha, Anthony and the Macavity Awards for Best Crime Non-Fiction.

The world’s greatest mystery writers on the world’s greatest mystery novels.

With so many mystery novels to choose from and so many new titles appearing each year, where should the reader start? What are the classics of the genre? Which are the hidden gems?

In the most ambitious anthology of its kind yet attempted, the world’s leading mystery writers have come together to champion the greatest mystery novels ever written. In a series of personal essays that often reveal as much about themselves and their work work as they do about the books that they love, more than 120 authors from twenty countries have created a guide that will be indispensable for generations of readers and writers. From Christie to Child and Poe to PD James, from Sherlock Holmes to Hannibal Lecter and Philip Marlowe to Peter Wimsey, BOOKS TO DIE FOR brings together the cream of the mystery world for a feast of reading pleasure, a treasure trove for those new to the genre and those who believe that there is nothing new left to discover. This is the one essential book for every reader who has ever finished a mystery novel and thought . . . I want more!

  For more on BOOKS TO DIE FOR, clickety-click here …

Wake Up, It’s Time To Die

It’s a rather nerve-wracking time right now at CAP Towers. BOOKS TO DIE FOR, which I’ve co-edited with John Connolly, will be published at the end of August, but even as you read this the contributors’ copies are winging their way around the globe, the reviewers’ copies are landing with a hefty thump in many hallways, and the genie is very much out of the bottle. Quoth the blurb elves:

With so many mystery novels to choose from and so many new titles appearing each year, where should the reader start? What are the classics of the genre? Which are the hidden gems? In the most ambitious anthology of its kind yet attempted, the world’s leading mystery writers have come together to champion the greatest mystery novels ever written. In a series of personal essays that often reveal as much about themselves and their work work as they do about the books that they love, more than 120 authors from twenty countries have created a guide that will be indispensable for generations of readers and writers. From Christie to Child and Poe to PD James, from Sherlock Holmes to Hannibal Lecter and Philip Marlowe to Peter Wimsey, BOOKS TO DIE FOR brings together the cream of the mystery world for a feast of reading pleasure, a treasure trove for those new to the genre and those who believe that there is nothing new left to discover. This is the one essential book for every reader who has ever finished a mystery novel and thought . . . I want more!

  This, of course, is always the period of phoney war. That agonizing time when you’ve done all you can to make a book as good as it can be, when editors and designers have wrought their magic, and the book seems to exist in a kind of limbo between what you hope it is and how the rest of the world will perceive it.
  There is nothing more to do but fret and sweat, and try not to obsess over the most minute of details.
  Unusually for me at this point in the proceedings, and alongside all the usual traumas, I’m feeling a quiet pride for helping to bring BOOKS TO DIE FOR to this stage. That’s the case even though there’s an added pressure on this occasion, because BTDF isn’t just my book, and won’t simply stand or fall on how my efforts. To a large extent, I think, the book belongs to everyone who contributed to it, and to the crime fiction / mystery community at large, writers and readers alike.
  But even while acknowledging that, and accepting that BTDF isn’t perfect - no book is, and I’d imagine that there will be very few well-informed crime / mystery readers who won’t read it and wail, ‘But what about [insert overlooked tome here]?’ - it still feels pretty good to have helped to bring the book this far. It was a fraught experience at times, and a steep learning curve, but it was terrific to be involved in it, and particularly to observe, in John, a writer at the top of his game and how he goes about his business.
  Being the generous soul he is, John Connolly won’t tell you that he pretty much shouldered said hefty tome up the hill and over the finish line in a kind of Sisyphus-taunting performance, but he did, and did so in some style too. For my own part, I like to think that I brought a little panache in the way I stood back and watched and admired, and occasionally applauded. It’s also true that Clair Lamb’s input was prodigious, crucial and never less than excellent.
  Anyway, as I say, the genie is out of the bottle now and on its way to a bookstore near you. Launch dates for BOOKS TO DIE FOR in South Africa, Dublin and Belfast can be found here, and there’s oodles of information on the book, its contributors and the books and authors they wrote about, here and here. I sincerely hope you enjoy …

Get Busy Dying

A trumpet-parp please, maestro …
  I’ll be writing about BOOKS TO DIE FOR in greater detail over the next couple of months, but for now I just want to put the word out there: this tasty little confection, edited by John Connolly and I, and about which I am very excited, is due on an Irish / UK / Australian / South African shelf near you on August 30th, and will be debuting on October 2nd, at the Cleveland Bouchercon, in North America. Quoth the blurb elves:

With so many mystery novels to choose from and so many new titles appearing each year, where should the reader start? What are the classics of the genre? Which are the hidden gems?

In the most ambitious anthology of its kind yet attempted, the world’s leading mystery writers have come together to champion the greatest mystery novels ever written. In a series of personal essays that often reveal as much about themselves and their work as they do about the books that they love, more than 120 authors from twenty countries have created a guide that will be indispensable for generations of readers and writers. From Christie to Child and Poe to PD James, from Sherlock Holmes to Hannibal Lecter and Philip Marlow to Peter Wimsey, BOOKS TO DIE FOR brings together the cream of the mystery world for a feast of reading pleasure, a treasure trove for those new to the genre and those who believe that there is nothing new left to discover. This is the one essential book for every reader who has ever finished a mystery novel and thought . . . I want more!

  So there you have it. If you want to take a wander over to the BOOKS TO DIE FOR website, there’s a section there where you can nominate the novel you think is absolutely indispensable for the great crime fiction canon. Or you could simply drop a note into the comment box below. As always, we’re open for business …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Casey Hill

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?
SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. There has never been a more perfect rendering of a psychopath than Harris’s brilliant Hannibal Lecter.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme - he’s super-smart, very cool and never has any problems getting a parking space in Manhattan.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Katie Price aka Jordan - she has the best story ideas. Nah, no such thing as guilt when it comes to reading anything.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Bringing our daughter Carrie into a book shop and seeing TABOO on the shelves for the first time. She was only nine months old but think she looked quite impressed.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Difficult question but would have to go with John Connolly’s THE WHITE ROAD, though his brilliant writing almost transcends genre.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Casey Hill’s TABOO, of course. Failing that, any one of John Connolly’s would transfer well to the big screen if the director could properly capture the supernatural elements.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Best: Being able to set your own hours and work from anywhere. Worst: Being able to set your own hours and work from anywhere.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Reilly Steel hunts down another gruesome murderer using street smarts and shiny new forensic equipment.

Who are you reading right now?
Chuffed to have been offered a sneak preview of Declan Burke’s fab new tome ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, which is actually very cool indeed.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
First, I’d beg him to let me write just once more before choosing to read. Then I’d ask Himself for an exclusive interview about his life story, write about it, then read away to my heart’s content on the Caribbean island I bought with the royalties.

Casey Hill’s TABOO is published by Simon & Schuster.

The Digested Read: DEXTER IS DELICIOUS by Jeff Lindsay

Being the continuing stooooooory of a quack who has gone to the - no, hold on, that’s the Muppet Show. Herewith be the latest in an increasingly improbable line of Digested Reads, aka the Novel du Jour in 300 words. Roll it there, Collette …

“Hi, I’m darkly disturbed Dexter. Deeply, dizzily deranged, in fact.
  “My schtick is that I murder scumbags with alliteration overkill - but hey, you try living in Miami without cutting loose once in a while.
  “That’s a psychopath joke, by the way. ‘Cutting loose’. Because I’m not just a deliciously diseased destroyer of depraved desperadoes, I’m a hoot and a half too. Deliriously delightful.
  “Anyhoo, that’s all in the past now. Yep, no more migraine-inducing alliteration for moi. I’ve had a baby, y’see, and she’s lovely. Luminously, lushly, ludicrously lovely. I mean, those psycho kids my wife Rita had before we met want to play with her all the time.
  “Gosh, I feel almost human. Hey, maybe all that morbid mutilating malarkey is a teensy-weensy bit immoral, eh?
  “Woah, stall the ball! There’s cannibals loose in Miami! And if there’s one thing that’s going to stop an invasion of cannibals, it’s an alliterating psychopath like devotedly dedicated defender Dexter.
  “Get the knives, kids - it’s play-time.
  “Did I mention that I’m a blood spatter forensic scientist attached to the Miami Police Department, even though I can’t stand the sight of blood? Irony, that is. Pay attention at the back, or I’ll kill you.
  “No, I’m only kidding. A jocular jester of joking japestery, c’est moi.
  “By the way, did I mention that my psycho-freak brother has turned up, and that he’s even more disgustingly dedicated to deviously depopulating than I am?
  “Rita’s freaky kids seem to like him, though.
  “What’s that? The cannibals? Right, yes. They want to eat me, apparently.
  “Take that, cannibal-types! Boosh! Ka-blooey!!
  “Incidentally, has anyone here read that Hannibal Lecter book about the charming psychopath? No? Thank God for that.
  “Bam! Biff!!
  “Feeling peckish, cannibal-types? Well, here’s a side order of Dexter’s divinely dispensed disingenuous DESTRUCTION!
  “De End.”

  THE DIGESTED READ, IN A LINE: I scream, you scream, we all scream for Miami Vice cream.

  This article first appeared in the Evening Herald.

Flick Lit # 164: The Butcher Boy

“Part Huck Finn, part Holden Caulfield, part Hannibal Lecter… a haunting narrative, lyrical and disturbing, horrific and hilarious.” So ran The New York Times’ verdict on Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy. The Washington Post concurred, calling The Butcher Boy, “A masterpiece of literary ventriloquism – a Beckett monologue with a plot by Hitchcock.” McCabe’s novel – his third, following Music on Clinton Street and Carn – deserved all these plaudits and more; 15 years on, it remains one of the must-read novels of the last decade of the 20th Century. Told in flashback by a middle-aged inhabitant of a mental institution, the tale appears deceptively straightforward: the decline and fall of young Francie Brady, wannabe cowboy and self-styled Pig Boy. The childish exuberance that sustains Francie’s imagination (“Death to all dogs who enter here, we said. Except us of course.”) curdles into the nasty delinquency of adolescence as a direct result of the way his native rural town reacts to the incipient madness and subsequent suicide of his mother. With his father, a failed trumpeter, the laughing stock of the town and an alcoholic to boot, Francie’s petulant fight-back against valley upon valley of squinting windows evolves into full-blown psychosis, complete with voices in his head, split personality and a paranoia that almost inevitably concludes with murderous violence. Few critics, however, made reference to the literary sensation of the previous year. Patrick Bateman, the eponymous anti-hero of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, was a slick, charming killer seemingly deranged by the vacuity of his fin de siécle existence. McCabe’s is by far the warmer, more human tale; he manages to evoke and then sustain empathy for his central character that – perversely – grew stronger even as Francie’s internal monologue descended into pitch-black farce. Perhaps it is Francie’s indomitable optimism in the face of overwhelming odds, and his unswerving, naïve belief in the good inherent in the human race that binds us to him. Few books, when you finally lay them to one side, prompt you to cheer through the tears. Despite the obvious dangers inherent in pandering to conventional notions of stage-Irish buffoonery (the novel’s author appears in cameo as the town drunk, playing the part with barely restrained relish and spoofing the cliché of drink-sodden Oirishness in the process), Neil Jordan’s (below right) film remains faithful to the novel’s sense of time and place, that of Co. Monaghan during the ’50s and ’60s, but refuses to indulge the insecurities that attend insularity. Francie’s existence is one of self-sufficient resistance to an impervious society and the mounting horror that stalks his gauche attempts to break into the world, but his consciousness is informed by superhero comics, the burgeoning rock ‘n’ roll revolution, and the long, cold shadow cast by the Cuban crisis. It is tempting to draw parallels between The Butcher Boy and The Company of Wolves, Jordan’s dark vision of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. Both films concern themselves with a vivid interior reality and a surreal interpretation of an ostensibly benign exterior world. But if comparisons must be made, it is perhaps truer to suggest that The Butcher Boy – in its inventive wordplay, chilling logic and murderous adolescent angst – is a rural Irish Clockwork Orange made for a generation uncomfortable with a celluloid history of begorrahs, shillelaghs and sticks with which to beat the pretty lady. John Ford might not have recognised it as such, but someone finally got around to making The Unquiet Man.- Michael McGowan