Review: DEADLY INTENT by Anna Sweeney

One of the reasons why Irish crime writing took so long to develop as a body of work is that Ireland lacked the kind of large, anonymous urban settings where crime fiction tends to thrive. In the era before the Celtic Tiger, in an Ireland long characterised by its squinting windows, the identity of a murderer was often known even before the gardaí arrived on the scene, which rather undermined the suspense element of a ‘whodunit’. There were exceptions, of course – we can go all the way back to Gerald Griffin’s The Collegians (1829), or more recently Patrick McGinley’s superb Bogmail (1978) – but for the most part it took a very brave writer to place an Irish murder mystery in a rural setting.
  The rise of Irish crime fiction has redrafted the parameters, of course, to the point where Anna Sweeney can set her debut novel Deadly Intent (Severn House) on the Beara Peninsula and hardly raise an eyebrow (the novel was originally published as gaeilge as Cló Iar-Chonnacht in 2010). The story opens with the discovery of an unconscious woman on a remote hiking trail; her name is Maureen, and she is a guest at Nessa McDermott’s country house Cnoc Meala (Honey Hill). Ambitious young garda Redmond Joyce (“clean-scrubbed and shiny”) is keen to solve the crime as a ticket away from the easy-going pace of life in southwest Ireland to the more adrenaline-charged environs of a big city posting, but soon the entire community is shocked to discover that Maureen’s alleged attacker, millionaire businessman Oscar Malden, has been brutally killed. As a media feeding frenzy descends on Beara, and the gardaí begin to wonder why Nessa’s husband Patrick has departed the country for Malawi at this crucial time, Nessa – herself a former investigative journalist – sets out to discover the truth behind Oscar Malden’s murder.
  What transpires is a murder mystery that firmly inhabits the ‘cosy’ end of the crime fiction spectrum. “Jack makes it all sound like a James Bond film,” observes one of Nessa’s friends about a tabloid hack making hay from the tragic events, but the country house, the idyllic rural backdrop and Nessa’s status as an amateur detective suggest that Deadly Intent is a charming throwback to the ‘Golden Age’ of 1930s mystery fiction. That said, the story is highly contemporary: one sub-plot involves a Russian ship and its crew abandoned by its owners in a nearby port, while drug smuggling on the southwest coast also features, as does illegal international arms dealing.
  One of the novel’s most striking features, unsurprisingly, is its use of the dramatic landscape, which is vividly sketched by Sweeney: “Behind them, Beara’s great backbone of the Caha mountains stretched out along the peninsula. Ahead of them … the dark waters of Lake Glanmore in the embrace of shapely hills; beyond it, a quilted blanket of fertile farmland and abundant hedges; and on neighbouring Iveragh peninsula across the slender rim of the bay, the tip of Carrantouhil, the country’s highest mountain, rising up to the clouds above the muscular shoulders of the Reeks.”
  As beautifully written as it is, there is perhaps a little too much by way of descriptive digression in Deadly Intent, and Nessa’s roundabout way of investigating the murder – which has, admittedly, the ring of truth; in rural Ireland, as with the Beara’s topography, the quickest route between two points is rarely a straight line – nevertheless slows down the main narrative and the central investigation. Those with patience will be rewarded, however, by a mystery with plenty of twists and turns, and one that is entirely faithful to its time and place. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Making A Killing

I interviewed Jeffrey Deaver (right) earlier this year, although for a variety of reasons the piece was only published last month. It runs like this:

“You may as well,” says author Jeffrey Deaver when I ask him if it’s okay to record our conversation. “It’s all going back to GCHG, and to the NSA and CIA anyway. Especially with this book.”
  The comment is delivered with Deaver’s dust-dry sense of humour, and sounds rather strange in the plush environs of the Merrion Hotel’s reception rooms, but he makes a valid point. The Kill Room is a very timely novel indeed – ‘oddly prescient’ is how Deaver describes it – which engages with some very contemporary headlines.
  “It deals with targeted killings,” says Deaver, “and only last month we had President Obama giving a press conference in which he talked about the killing of American citizens. It deals with data-mining, and we’ve just had this big scandal about [Edward] Snowden releasing that information. And there’s a whistle-blower, which is, again, Snowden. But I don’t want readers to think that Jeffrey Deaver is or has become a political writer. It’s the only political book I’ve ever written. It just happened that all these things came together at the same time.”
  Indeed, Deaver is at pains to stress that the political is not the personal in his novel.
  “I fall back on the adage that has been attributed to Ernest Hemingway,” he says. “Hemingway said, if you want to send a message, use Western Union. Meaning, it’s not the author’s job to give his or her own personal views in a novel, but it is the author’s job to raise the questions. I feel that even my kind of entertaining thrillers, which is the point of what I do, enhance the experience if you bring in issues that transcend the crime itself.
  “My goal is to entertain,” he continues. “I’ll do whatever I can to get readers to turn pages, so they lose sleep at night, they show up for work late. If somebody closes a Deaver book and says only, ‘I found that interesting,’ then I’ve failed. What I want them to do is close a book and say, ‘Oh my God, I survived that book!’
  The Kill Room is the 10th Lincoln Rhyme novel, and Jeffrey Deaver’s 30th in total. It opens with the targeted killing of an American citizen in the Bahamas, a murder that New York-based forensic scientist Lincoln Rhyme is commissioned to investigate on the basis that the ‘kill order’ was issued in New York state. Complicating matters, as always, is the fact that Lincoln Rhyme is a quadriplegic who very rarely leaves his customised apartment.
  “Lots of internal reversals, cliffhangers, some esoteric information about, and surprise endings, plural,” is how the author describes his recipe for ‘a Deaver novel’, but back in 1997, with eight novels already published, Deaver was looking to offer the reader yet another twist in terms of character.
  “I thought,” he says, ‘How about we do Sherlock Holmes? We haven’t seen Sherlock Holmes for a while.’ That sounds quite egotistical, and I wouldn’t want to take on Arthur Conan Doyle – I mean, he was a spiritualist, so he might come back to haunt me (laughs). But I wanted a character who was a cerebral man, a thinker. Holmes could fight if he had to, or go somewhere in disguise. I wanted someone who had no choice but to out-think his opponent. That was what I was trying to do in The Bone Collector. I never imagined that Lincoln would become as popular as he has.”
  The Bone Collector was adapted into a successful movie starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, but for Deaver the novel is the most persuasive storytelling form.
  “I do believe that as an emotional experience,” he says, “reading fiction is the highest form of entertainment – I’m not going to use the word ‘art’, but I’ll say ‘entertainment’. That’s because it requires active participation on the part of the reader, as opposed to a film or a video game, where you tend to be more passive. Even in video games where you’re participating in a shoot-’em-up, it’s not really intellectually or emotionally engaging. So with that element of the book as an experience, we start from higher ground right away.”
  He chose the thriller form because it is, as John Connolly has suggested in the past, a kind of Trojan Horse that allows an author to smuggle virtually any kind of subject matter into the public domain – such as the political ambiguities of The Kill Room – in the disguise of popular fiction.
  “Well, John is absolutely right. Crime fiction permits and even urges us authors to consolidate as many different strains of conflict as we can, which is what storytelling is all about.” The fact that the crime novel is rooted in modern realities also makes it, he says, ‘a touch more compelling’ than other kinds of fiction.
  “Lord of the Rings is probably my favourite book ever,” he says, “but you have to buy into a whole lot of disbelief for that book. I mean, if you’re on the subway in New York City, do you really believe an orc is going to come in with scimitar and slice your head off? No. I love Stephen King, but do I really believe there’s a ghost in my closet? No. I do enjoy those books, but in a crime novel, if you answer the door and a cop holds up his badge, you let him in – and then you realise he’s wearing cloth gloves, and holding a knife in his other hand. That could happen.”
  Jeffrey Deaver is today an award-winning author who invariably tops the bestseller lists. For a writer who might be expected to rest on his laurels, however, he is still refreshingly ambitious. Despite being a writer who specialises in cerebral characters, he took on the challenge of writing Carte Blanche (2011), about the thriller genre’s most celebrated action-hero, James Bond. Meanwhile, his next novel, The October List, which will be published in October, is a standalone thriller which radically reworks the conventions of the genre and which Deaver describes as his most complex plot yet.
  Why is he still so determined to challenge himself?
  “I’m worried that some day I’ll wake up and discover that everyone has realised I’m a fake and a fraud,” he says.
  Perhaps that’s why he’s notorious for ‘micro-managing’ his books, taking eight months to sketch out an outline of 150-200 pages for a 400-page book.
  “I’m a pretty sloppy writer,” he shrugs. “I get the ideas down, I bang them out. My first drafts are messy, they’re too long, I always put in a lot more research than I need. I used to panic about that. I’d read something I’d written and go, ‘Where did this crap come from?’ And then I learned to say, ‘But at least you recognise it’s crap. That’s the good thing.’”

  The Kill Room by Jeffrey Deaver is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: FAULKS ON FICTION: GREAT BRITISH CHARACTERS AND THE SECRET LIFE OF THE NOVEL by Sebastian Faulks

Lists are fine things, particularly if you’re in an argumentative mood, and FAULKS ON FICTION, being a list of great fictional British characters, is especially provocative. Faulks, the author of ‘Birdsong’ and other very fine novels, has divided his book into four headings: ‘Heroes’, ‘Lovers’, ‘Snobs’ and ‘Villains’, offering seven examples in each section. Thus the book takes us on an odyssey through British literature that begins in the Caribbean with ROBINSON CRUSOE and meanders right through to the present day, culminating in Faulks’ take on Barbara Covett, the villain of Zoë Heller’s NOTES ON A SCANDAL.
  Along the way we encounter some of the greats of the British novel, including Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Henry Fielding, Emily Brontë and Thomas Hardy.
  Given that the book was written as a tie-in with the recent BBC series of the same name, the style is unsurprisingly light and breezy. It’s also very readable, in part because Faulks spends a good chunk of his introduction debunking the various literary critiques that bedevilled the development of the novel in the late 20th century. It may be ‘old-fashioned’ he says, but he is determined to treat the characters as if they were real people, gauging their worth in terms of the impact they’ve had on the reading public.
  It’s a laudable ambition, although Faulks’ modus operandi works better for some characters than others. When writing about personal favourites, such as Emma Woodhouse or Sherlock Holmes, Faulks is intensely engaging (although prone to hyperbole: “Is there no flaw in this dazzling, Mozartian performance?” he wonders of Jane Austen’s EMMA). On the other hand, some chapters have a cursory feel, and read like little more than synopses with occasional digressions.
  What is most disappointing about the collection is its predictability. “The novel was, from the start, a popular and middle-class form,” says Faulks during his chapter on Fielding’s TOM JONES, and his selection of characters seems determined to prove that the novel - or more properly, the literary novel - is still very much a middle-class obsession. The roll-call of names will be familiar to most readers, from Daniel Defoe to Dickens, Jane Austen and Emily Brontë to William Golding and Doris Lessing, up to the present day and Martin Amis, Alan Hollingsworth and Monica Ali.
  In fact, and despite the ‘British’ flavour promised in the subtitle, the collection is a very English one, even when the characters under discussion are marooned on a desert island, mired in the Indian Raj, or immigrants from Bangladesh.
  Furthermore, there is very little that is challenging to the status quo. No Lawrence Durrell, for example, who was being touted in the 1960s as the next James Joyce. Indeed, there’s no James Joyce. John Fowles merits only a line or two; Mary Renault only one, and that in terms of her early, ‘lesbian’ novels. Olivia Manning goes unmentioned, as does Kazuo Ishiguro, while Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson merit only token references, if that.
  Stevenson, perhaps above all others, has good reason to be miffed at his exclusion. Long John Silver and the Dr Jekyll / Mr Hyde doppelganger are two of the most memorable characters in the history of the novel, and it beggars belief that not even one of Stevenson’s heroes or villains was deemed worthy of inclusion.
  One non-literary character who did sneak into the collection is James Bond, in the ‘Snobs’ section of the book. Unfortunately, Faulks does himself - and his argument in favour of literary snobs - no favours by spending most of the chapter talking about his own very enjoyable experience of writing a Bond novel, DEVIL MAY CARE (2009). Not that there is anything wrong with the chapter per se, but it’s telling that Faulks’ mini-biography at the end of the book lists all of his own novels bar DEVIL MAY CARE.
  This snobbishness about the literary novel reaches a climax late in the collection, when Faulks discusses Wilkie Collins’ THE WOMAN IN WHITE, which is regarded as one of the earliest examples of the thriller. Rather than celebrate the crime genre on its own terms, however, Faulks prefaces his exploration of the novel’s villain, Count Fosco, by recounting how plot-driven novels fell out of favour in the 20th century, only to be reinvigorated not by the various genre fictions of crime, science-fiction and romance, but by Proust’s A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU and Flaubert’s MADAME BOVARY. Were he not so serious, the proposition would be laughable.
  At times, Faulks is so beautifully precise that you almost forgive him his blinkered outlook. The happy-go-lucky Tom Jones is “a jolly cork on a choppy sea”; writing about love, or Graham Greene’s version of same, Faulks says, “All culture is for it; almost all history is against it.”
  Such insights are few and far between, however. FAULKS ON FICTION makes for an entertaining read, but it’s little more than a primer for those who have forgotten the main plot points of some of the great English novels. - Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Sunday Business Post

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Peter Leonard

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?
THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE by George V. Higgins. My father, Elmore Leonard, gave me the book right after it came out. He said, “Read this. You won’t believe how good it is.” And he was right.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
James Bond. Looks like he has a pretty good time.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I read ‘People’ magazine, which chronicles the comings and goings of American movie stars, important stuff like who’s dating whom, where they vacation, what clubs they frequent.

Most satisfying writing moment?
My agent called telling me St. Martin’s Press had made an offer on QUIVER,
my first novel.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
THE GUARDS by Ken Bruen. Jack Taylor is a wonderful character, and Ken is a hell of a writer. His prose is gritty, violent and funny. I read it in one sitting.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
IN THE WOODS by Tana French.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst is probably the sting of a bad review. The best, I get paid to invent characters and tell stories. What could be better than that?

The pitch for your next book is …?
It’s 1971. A Holocaust survivor’s daughter is killed in an auto accident by a German diplomat. Harry Levin, a scrap metal dealer from Detroit, goes to Washington D.C. to claim his daughter’s body and find out what happened. A D.C. detective named Taggart tells Harry the incident has been covered up by the U.S. State Department. The diplomat, who was drunk, has been released from police custody and given immunity. Harry flies to Munich to get revenge and learns that the diplomat, Ernst Hess, figures in his past.

Who are you reading right now?
MR. PEANUT by Adam Ross.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write. It’s too compelling to give up.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Character-driven suspense.

Peter Leonard’s ALL HE SAW WAS THE GIRL is published by Faber and Faber.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: SEAN CONNERY: THE MEASURE OF A MAN by Christopher Bray

Beware the double meaning of that subtitle. The conventional reading, of course, is that Bray is taking the measure of his subject, although the biographer does not pretend that his appraisal of Connery will be rigorously objective. Connery, writes Bray, had at an early age ‘showed me a vision of the man I wanted to be.’
  Given that Bray was a boy when he first saw Connery play James Bond in ‘Diamonds are Forever’ (1971), this is entirely understandable. In his introduction, however, Bray gives the subtitle another reading. Quoting the film critic Pauline Kael, Bray claims that every man born in the past half-century or so wants to be Sean Connery when he grows up. The implicit suggestion is that Connery’s masculinity is the standard against which all men must measure themselves, particularly in terms of Connery’s most famous role. “If part of wanting to be Connery is wanting to be Bond,” Bray writes, “the whole of wanting to be Bond is wanting to be Connery.”
  What’s fascinating about Bray’s book is Connery’s love-hate relationship with the character that made him a star, yet pigeonholed him as a particular kind of actor. Unfortunately for Bray, that’s well-worn ground, as the author is well aware. In further defining his remit, he claims that, “ … this is a book about the [Bond] movies and what they have done to us.” A leap of faith allows Bray to assert that the early Bond movies were something of a fulcrum upon which the business (if not the art) of filmmaking turned. He then spends the rest of the book analysing the films of the star’s post-Bond career by judging each new project against what Bray describes as ‘Connery’s languorously insurrectionary take on what he saw as this jumped-up imperialist bore.’
  This insistence on comparing all of Connery’s post-Bond work to ‘Dr No’ (1962) and ‘From Russia With Love’ (1963) begins to grate very quickly. Moreover, Bray is often unnecessarily wordy as he strains to ascribe significance to some of Connery’s more mundane celluloid outings. One use of ‘synecdoche’ is happenstance, if we can paraphrase Ian Fleming, and twice bad editing; a third usage suggests that Bray is as guilty as Connery when he wonders ‘whether Connery’s fondness for [Ingmar] Bergman might not consist largely in a belief that seriousness is the same thing as significance.’
  It almost goes without saying that Bray does not penetrate the Connery mystique to any great extent. “What strikes you most about Connery is his sheer down-to-earth ordinariness,” Bray observes two pages short of the end of the book, although given how little Bray has excavated of Connery’s off-screen persona other than his well-known passions for golf, football and Scottish nationalism, that’s hardly surprising. The star’s son Jason gets one blink-and-you-miss-it reference, for example.
  That said, Connery is notorious for not collaborating with biographers, so Bray’s account is not unusual in that respect. The result, however, is something of a cut-and-paste compilation of second- and third-hand sources, woven together by Bray’s exuberant enthusiasm for his subject matter, which is at times exhilarating, at others downright repellent.
  It’s when Bray goes to bat for Connery over allegations of domestic violence that the reader gets a sour taste in the mouth. First the author glosses over the suggestion that Connery deliberately struck co-star Gina Lollobrigida on the set of ‘Woman of Straw’ (1964) (“It’s possible,” comments Bray, “that there might have been something to the rumours of on-set enmity between [the] two stars.”). Later, he closely parses the vivid account given by Connery’s first wife, Diane Cilento, of her husband’s assault towards the end of the shoot for ‘The Hill’ (1965). “Alas,” concludes Bray, “she hid herself away so well that no one has ever been able to corroborate this story.”
  Connery’s infamous interview with Playboy magazine, on the other hand, is a matter of record. “I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman,” Connery told journalist David Lewin in 1965, “although I don’t recommend doing it in the same way that you’d hit a man.”
  Here Bray jumps through a number of hoops on behalf of his hero, first suggesting that such comments were not out of the ordinary at the time, before going on to define the question and answer ‘in narrowly legalistic’ terms, before finally asserting that, “Connery nowhere advocates the hitting of women” (italics Bray’s).
  Such ‘narrowly legalistic’ nit-picking, however, is completely at odds with Bray’s unabashed eulogising of Connery’s ability to humanise the sadistic, quasi-fascistic James Bond for a mainstream audience. It’s also the kind of self-serving double-think that allows Bray to gush as if in a homo-erotic frenzy about Connery’s physical presence, even as he rues the quality of most of the actor’s post-Bond output.
  In a nutshell, this is the perfect book for that audience that still believes Sean Connery is God’s gift to the Silver Screen. Unfortunately for Christopher Bray, that audience is likely to consist only of Christopher Bray. - Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Sunday Business Post.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Peter Robinson

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?
THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
James Bond.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I find no guilt in reading anything at all.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Sniffing my first book.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Anything by John Connolly.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Anything by John Connolly.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Not having to get up early or wear a suit. The isolation.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Bonnie and Clyde meets WUTHERING HEIGHTS.

Who are you reading right now?
Justin Cronin.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Bloody hard work.

Peter Robinson’s BAD BOY is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Kevin Power

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?
I suppose everyone says THE BIG SLEEP, don’t they? It’s THE GREAT GATSBY of crime fiction. And I like to think that I’d be just slapdash enough to forget, in true Chandleresque style, who killed that chauffeur.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
James Bond. I remember being very impressed, as a kid, when I read GOLDFINGER and learned that Bond concealed his Walther PPK in a book called THE BIBLE DESIGNED TO BE READ AS LITERATURE. I think that was when I realised that true style is in the details.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
The Spenser novels by the late, great Robert B. Parker. Starting with THE GODWULF MANUSCRIPT in 1973, Spenser evolved into one of the great heroes of American popular fiction. Spenser isn’t really a noir protagonist in the true sense – he never compromises, and he’s always right. The Spenser books are basically romances in which the questing hero always triumphs, which I reckon is what makes them so satisfying.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When I was about thirty pages from the end of BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, I suddenly knew what the last paragraph would be, and I scribbled it down then and there. The most satisfying moment was realising everything else was done and I could finally type that final paragraph.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Declan Hughes’s Ed Loy novels are turning into a running commentary on the state of the nation, using the PI genre as a hook. I suspect Ed is the first fictional gumshoe ever to find himself in negative equity. And Hughes can really write, too.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE KILLING KIND by John Connolly. Because of the villain, mostly: Mr. Pudd, the unbelievably creepy arachnophile psychopath who kills people by jamming their mouths with chloroformed black widows. You could traumatize a lot of people by putting Mr. Pudd on screen.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
I can’t see much of a downside. The best thing is when you know you’ve got something right – a sentence, a paragraph, even a section title.

The pitch for your next book is …?
I have to write the bleedin’ thing first.

Who are you reading right now?
In my non-writing life I’m supposed to be doing a PhD on Norman Mailer, so I’ve just read a memoir called MORNINGS WITH MAILER by Dwayne Raymond, who was Mailer’s personal assistant for the last four years of his life. What amazed me was the account of Mailer’s work ethic. The man revised everything five or six times, even if it was just a Christmas card.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I think if God appears, I’ll have bigger problems ...

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
I aim for clarity, honesty, and what you might call “flow” – I want people to turn the pages.

The paperback edition of Kevin Power’s BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK is published by Pocket Books.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: 61 HOURS by Lee Child

Lee Child’s 14th offering reads like High Noon blended with the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, in which our strong, silent hero finds himself stuck in a blizzard-trapped town, reluctantly helping out the beleaguered local police force.
  Child is an unusual thriller writer in that his novels - which all feature the same protagonist, Jack Reacher - are sometimes told in the first person voice, others in the third. 61 HOURS is a third-person narrative, which affords an emotional distance from Reacher. This is not strictly speaking a necessary device, as Reacher is an impassive character who is rarely if ever given to emotional displays.
  That said, Reacher is himself a likeable character. Although he has been compared to James Bond, his status as a drifter (albeit an ex-military man) precludes him from carrying weapons in 61 HOURS. He proves himself very resourceful in other ways, however, and his eye for detail - and Lee Child’s impressive research - is frequently entertaining.
  On the downside, the fact that he is a series character lessens the tension somewhat, given that Jack Reacher will inevitably reach the end of the story in one piece, regardless of how high are the odds stacked against him. Mind you, 61 HOURS ends with an explosive climax, from which it’s difficult to see Reacher escaping. (We’re promised another Jack Reacher novel in six months’ time, so you would have to assume that he survives.)
  Child also creates a number of interesting secondary characters, chief among them the local deputy of police Peterson. A hardworking, blue-collar guy, Peterson represents the morality of the piece, along with Janet Salter, an aging librarian who has witnessed a murder and is under police protection. The Chief of Police, Holland, is potentially a more fascinating character, given that his moral compass is skewed, but Child tends to create characters who are either all good or all bad. A Mexican drug lord called Plato accounts for the latter in this novel; again a potentially interesting character, his story becomes little more than a litany of ruthless and often lethal actions as the narrative progresses.
  61 HOURS is neither emotionally nor morally complex. That may well be the price readers of high-concept thrillers pay, but there are clear hints that Child is capable of far more complex work than is evidenced in this novel. Despite the attention to detail, and the fact that Child roots the story in an utterly plausible reality, there’s a cartoon quality to Jack Reacher and his world in terms of its black-and-white depictions of good and evil.
  For that reason, 61 HOURS demands a suspension of disbelief from the reader that can be hard to sustain. As a kind of trade-off, Child maintains a blistering pace throughout, employing brevity when it comes to chapter length, with each chapter ending on a cliff-hanger.
  The caveats are minor, though. This was my first Jack Reacher novel, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Child’s style is terse and economical, and while the book is a page-turner, the swift pace never felt rushed. - Declan Burke

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE LOST SYMBOL by Dan Brown

I’ve damned Dan Brown fairly liberally in these pages in the past, not least by lumping him in with John Grisham and James Patterson as some kind of unholy trinity that gives crime writing a bad name. So I wasn’t expecting much when I was commissioned to review THE LOST SYMBOL, although I did crack the pages with as open a mind as I was able to muster. And whaddya know, it was fun. Hokey, schlocky fun, for sure, but fun. Is there room in the world for fun books? God, I hope so … Anyway, herewith be the review:

“If you’re out to describe the truth,” Albert Einstein declared, “leave elegance to the tailor.”
  Elegance may be at a premium in Dan Brown’s ‘The Lost Symbol’ but there is – theoretically – no end to the truth to be uncovered by symbologist Robert Langdon when he gets sucked into an anti-Masonic conspiracy set in Washington, D.C.. Called to America’s capital by his good friend and mentor, the high-ranking Mason Peter Solomon, Langdon quickly finds himself in possession of a coded pyramid and pursued by the CIA. Decoded, the pyramid promises knowledge of the Ancient Mysteries the Masons have for centuries hoarded on behalf of all mankind; but Mal’akh, a sinister, tattooed eunuch, is determined that mankind will never experience true enlightenment.
  Unsurprisingly, ‘The Lost Symbol’ offers many of the features that made ‘The Da Vinci Code’ a phenomenal best-seller. The story takes place over a few hours; short chapters and teasing cliff-hangers create a propulsive momentum; the twists and turns are drip-fed in the form of information dumps by the polymath Langdon. Word games, secret societies and global conspiracies all figure, with Langdon, by turns hapless and brilliant, something of a flesh-and-blood philosopher’s stone who transforms the apparently blind alleys of Washington D.C. into the shimmering glories of Classical Rome.
  The prose is clunky, certainly, and Brown has an irritating penchant for italics, while the excessive use of exposition makes a mockery of the dictum, ‘Show, don’t tell’. The storytelling is preposterously melodramatic, and all but very few of the characters appear to have been borrowed from wherever it is they store the Bond villains who weren’t quite villainous, insane or megalomaniac enough to make a worthy adversary for 007. That said, there’s no denying that the story is as addictive the next cigarette. You know it’s not good for you, and you’ll probably feel bad afterwards, but hey, one more hit won’t kill you …
  If the backdrop to ‘The Da Vinci Code’ was largely based on ‘The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail’, the backbone of ‘The Lost Symbol’ is Fritjof Capra’s ‘The Tao of Physics’. Here Brown seeks to blend the mysticism of Far Eastern, Egyptian, Classical and early European societies with the latest advances in quantum physics and the ‘metaphysical philosophy’ of noetics. He invokes a number of eminent scientists – Newton, Spinoza, Bohr – in the process, although none are more name-checked (or misrepresented) than Einstein, who spent the latter part of his career in a fruitless attempt to justify his claim that God does not play dice.
  It’s an entertaining romp, if you’re prepared to ignore some of the more outrageous assertions about the links between, say, the Upanishads and string theory, but there is a crucial difference between ‘The Lost Symbol’ and ‘The Da Vinci Code’. In the latter, Brown was taking aim at one of the western world’s most sacred cows. Here he is bent on rehabilitating the reputation of one of its most tarnished icons, that of America itself. Whether that perverse spirit of anti-iconoclasm is sufficient to drive ‘The Lost Symbol’ to sales of eighty million copies remains to be seen. – Declan Burke

  This review first appeared in the Irish Times

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: James McCreet

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?
James Ellroy’s THE COLD SIX THOUSAND. The man is just a genius. The scale and complexity of his books is a superhuman feat.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
James Bond – no hesitation. He is in many ways a classic fantasy figure for a writer: solitary, self-sufficient, dogged, independent, happy to enjoy luxuries on the expense account, and occasionally homicidal.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
For years I read the American pulp spy thrillers by ‘Nick Carter’ – pure schlock full of sex, violence and weaponry. I picked up a few old copies recently and again enjoyed their no-nonsense break-neck narratives tremendously.

Most satisfying writing moment?
My forthcoming book (July 2010) is absolutely crammed with them (particularly the opening 500 words), but the best piece of writing is always the one I do tomorrow …

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Much as I am tempted to make something up, I’ll be honest and say I have virtually no knowledge of Irish crime novels. I have a copy of Brian McGilloway’s BORDERLANDS by the bed and, having met the man last weekend, I am looking forward to reading it.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Sorry – no idea.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Best – feeling that each day I write is a day of my life I haven’t wasted. Worst – having to make a choice between visiting the world in my head and the world with my wife in it.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Top secret, but utterly unprecedented.

Who are you reading right now?
Philip Hoare’s LEVIATHAN. I’ve just re-read MOBY-DICK and can’t get enough of whales at the moment. I’m considering writing a sea epic of my own in a few years.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Easy – I’d write. By writing, I get the best of both worlds. And anyway, the pressures of writing novels while working full time means I pretty much made that decision a couple of years ago.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Entertaining, surprising, compelling

James McCreet’s THE INCENDIARY’S TRAIL is published by Macmillan

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: CJ West

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?
THE DA VINCI CODE. It’s not necessarily a crime novel, but it would give me the freedom to write about any subject I chose for the rest of my career. I don’t strive to be recognized as a literary genius. I enjoy entertaining people and I think THE DA VINCI CODE did that better than any modern book.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
James Bond. He’s everything we want a hero to be and even though he pushes the limits of reason, we gladly follow along on his adventures. He also has an air of civility even in the most heated battle. I’d like to think I’d be so gentlemanly in his circumstances.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
My writing qualifies as a guilty pleasure, but I feel no guilt in reading every thriller or mystery author I discover. I find that I can learn something from whichever writer I pick up. I do really enjoy Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child. I’ve read so many of their books, that I don’t think I could learn more from their style of writing. I read them because I know I’m going to enjoy the book front to back. Lately I’ve been sprinkling in more non-fiction.

Most satisfying writing moment?
I went to a Christmas party with a group of people I didn’t know well. I was leaving a room and a guy grabbed me by the sleeve and asked if I was CJ West. When he learned that I was, he started raving about SIN & VENGEANCE and didn’t stop for over an hour. At my next event, he bought 16 copies for friends and family.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I’m only about 16% Irish, so my books don’t count. I’ll have to turn that around and say that my favourite Irish writer is Casey Sherman from Cape Cod.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
I love everything about being a writer. If there is one thing I’d rather not have to worry about, that would be marketing and selling books. Being a writer allows me to enjoy the solitude of working alone uninterrupted for much of the time and still allows me to get out and see people at events and book signings. I enjoy the stages of every book from concept, to drafting, to meeting readers. My favourite part of the process is the early creative work on any book. Creating characters and plotting books keeps me up late into the night and I can do it for weeks on end. The excitement consumes me and I don’t need anything else except food and a little sleep. Of course my kids have different ideas ...

The pitch for your next book is …?
I’m writing the next book in the Randy Black series. For those who haven’t started, you can get the first book, SIN & VENGEANCE, for free as an e-book on my website. In this new book Randy meets Gretchen Greene, a young woman who has discovered something that will change the world. Unfortunately, very powerful people don’t want this discovery to come to light. As Randy does his best to save Gretchen, he discovers that the two of them couldn’t disagree more about the nature of creation.

Who are you reading right now?
BEN FRANKLIN: AN AMERICAN LIFE, Walter Isaacson; THE INNOCENT, Harlan Coben; THE ACRONYM, Rebecca Lerwill; MOMENT OF TRUTH, Lisa Scottoline.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I would write and try and figure out how to satisfy my desire to learn about the world in some other way. I’m compelled to write and would probably explode if I couldn’t.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Intense, unpredictable, realistic.

CJ West’s A DEMON AWAITS is available now.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Jeremy Duns

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?
ENDLESS NIGHT by Agatha Christie. It’s a late novel of hers, and oddly reminiscent of the Angry Young Men novels. It’s beautifully crafted, haunting, with a killer ending.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
James Bond - he lives well, saves the world, and survives.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Dennis Wheatley’s Gregory Sallust spy thrillers.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Coming up with the title for my first novel: FREE AGENT. I wanted something that was very simple, in the vein of Geoffrey Household’s ROGUE MALE, but that would also reveal another layer once you’d finished the book. I just felt a great burden had been lifted and it acted as a kind of mini-tone poem guiding the rest of the book.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Not exactly a crime novel, although it features plenty of crimes, Joseph Hone’s THE SIXTH DIRECTORATE, part of the superb Peter Marlow spy series, sadly long out of print. Gripping plot, beautiful prose.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE BIG O, of course!

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is the mental strain of putting it all together. The best thing is being paid to do what you love.

The pitch for your next book is …?
1969: a British spy on the run in Biafra has to confront his past.

Who are you reading right now?
George Blake’s memoirs, NO OTHER CHOICE.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Spare, gripping, sweat-inducing.

Jeremy Duns’s FREE AGENT will be published in May 2009 by Simon & Schuster.

The Name’s Blond, Blond Satan

Wandered along to the new James Bond movie on Friday night, anticipating a very good time on the basis that the reviews were saying Bond had gone psycho while trying to avenge the murder of Vesper in Casino Royale (actually, that bit I didn’t really get, because if memory serves Vesper ratted out Bond near the end of Casino Royale – so why should he give a rat’s fundament? Or wasn’t I paying attention?). Anyway, if you liked Daniel Craig’s first outing as Bond, you’ll probably like this one too. It’s a tad darker in tone, although it’s nowhere as bleakly nihilistic as some folk were reporting, and Craig is probably the most effective Bond yet, Connery included. There’s a beautiful little moment early on in the flick, where, having dispensed with yet another bad guy, Bond pauses to take the guy’s pulse and ensure he’s dead before moving on to search his room. You can believe that quality of sadistic professionalism of Craig’s Bond, his impassive features and ice-blue eyes perfect for the part of Fleming’s (barely) human weapon – watching Craig in the early part of the movie, actually, I was reminded of Hammett’s description of Sam Spade as ‘a blond Satan’. Unfortunately, that little interlude is about the only original or fresh idea in the entire movie. It’s all put together with some style, and the various chase scenes are quite polished – although the editing in the early sections appear to have been done by a team of monkeys deprived of their Ritalin – but the overall sense of the thing is that they’re still chasing the Bourne market with a more downbeat, ruthless Bond, while still hung up on the idea of Bond being a noble character who only wants what’s best for queen and country. It’s all jolly good fun, mind, and it’s a hell of a lot better than most Bond flicks – but you just wish, with Craig in the role, they were prepared to let 007 off the leash, just for once.

Mi Casa, Su Casa: Adrian McKinty on The English Detective

The continuing stooooooory of how the Grand Vizier puts his feet up and lets other people talk some sense for a change. This week: Adrian McKinty (right) on the English detective.

The English Detective, Reconsidered

“At this year’s Oscars, Tilda Swinton declared that the Best Actor winners were examples of a triumphant Celtic spirit. Swinton, who was born in London and went to the same school as Princess Diana, thinks of herself as Scottish. The other big Oscar winner, Daniel Day Lewis, also born and raised in London, considers himself Irish. Irish indeed is the default nationality for uncomfortable Englishmen everywhere. Some sneak themselves in so successfully we forget that they’re actually from over the sheugh, while others fail miserably. Jeremy Irons is never going to convince anyone of his essential Mickness but Shane McGowan, that wonderful living (still, I think) stereotype was born and went to school in Tunbridge Wells.
  “Now, I don’t mind sharing my Irishness with anyone. As far as I’m concerned, if you want to call yourself Irish but you and your family have been living in, say Boston, for the last hundred and forty years, well then that’s okay. We all do it: sometimes I cheer for the Kenyan marathoners because only a few thousand generations ago my very own ancestors were traipsing round the Great Rift Valley hunting antelope. No, what makes me sad about all of this is the rejection of Englishness.
  “I think it began in the seventies, perhaps through a combination of football hooliganism, economic recession, colonial guilt and Kevin Keegan’s haircut: a perfect storm which produced a generation who considered Englishness an embarrassing, guilt-ridden appendage. For five centuries before 1978 it was good to be Anglo-Saxon, but then almost overnight it wasn’t. On a recent podcast even The Greatest Living Englishman, Stephen Fry, admitted that he really wanted to be Oscar Wilde.
  “Literary fiction hasn’t produced new role models. The best English writers have always come from humble origins but these days brainy escapers tend to write screenplays or code for video games. Reading has become an almost cult behaviour with the consequence that the literary universe has gotten more clubbish, more exclusive and more out of touch than ever.
  “Movies haven’t helped either. I have never seen a Hugh Grant film in my life (I’m saving that experience for an eternity in hell) but I’ll bet Grant’s stuttering, foppish, sarcastic, allegedly witty characters do the English no favours. There’s a thin line a being a wit and a complete cunt, as that wannabe Irishman John Lydon once said.
  “So where does an Englishman (Swinton aside, women don’t usually have this problem) turn if he’s looking for an archetype? Music? Fuggedaboutit. The Gallagher brothers are no-talent has-beens, Tom Yorke is a doom-saying mystic and Duffy’s a girl. And Welsh. All the most famous Englishmen these days are, God save us, chefs.
  “No, I suggest that the confused Englishman reject all of this and embrace an older role model, that of the sophisticated, smart, unruffled, classic English detective.
  “Sherlock Holmes (right) sprang from the mind of a Lowland Scot but essentially he’s as English as soft-boiled eggs, warm rain, rudeness in restaurants, kindness to animals, cruelty to children, etc. On TV he’s usually a chilly savant but in the books he’s a moody dope fiend, prone to fisticuffs, occasionally witty and of course hyper-intelligent. The downside is Holmes’ snobbishness and his fawning attitude towards royalty, but you can forgive him his milieu. If more Brits behaved like Holmes they’d still miss penalties in crucial football games but at least they wouldn’t blub about it.
  “If Sherlock Holmes isn’t your cup of tea, there are many others. We’ll skip over Lord Peter Wimsey (see snobbishness above) and go straight to Philip Marlowe. Courteous, smart and funny; a seducer of violet-eyed heiresses, a resister of femmes fatale. And cool. Sherlock Holmes is a lot of things but he’s not hip. Marlowe is, in spades. If cool were America, Holmes would be a hick town in Kansas and Marlowe would be the East Village. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Wasn’t Philip Marlowe born in Santa Rosa, California? Didn’t that American actor Humphrey Bogart play him in the movies? How can he be English? He just is, that’s all.
  “Like Chandler himself, Marlowe was born Stateside but obviously, like Chandler, he went to school in London and spent his formative years in England, becoming - again, like Chandler - a naturalized Brit. Marlowe likes poetry, chess, the aesthetic, the Old World, ancient books over modern, the nineteenth century over the twentieth, metaphor over simile, violet over blue. His phoney accent doesn’t fool me, he’s a Brit through and through. His name is English, his clothes are British, the weather owes more to London than Santa Monica and his stance has a certain trans-Atlantic panache. Both he and James Bond are late thirties but Marlowe’s world weary cynicism is more appropriate than Bond’s boyish enthusiasm as a response to the anomie and existential crises of our nightmare epoch. Marlowe’s your man if you went to blend your own rye whiskey and look through rainy windows at the poor deluded fools dreaming their lives away while the world goes to hell about them.
  “If neither of those guys work for you, you could look at Inspector Wexford and Adam Dalgliesh but for me the apotheosis of the type has to be Chief Inspector Morse of the Oxford Constabulary. Morse has the virtues and vices of the classically educated man. He is continually outraged by the psychopathology of every day life. He hates deadlines, cell-phones, meetings, workshops, press conferences, television, gossip mags, celebrities, chilled beer … As Brian Wilson once said, he just wasn’t made for these times. Who is? With insanity everywhere, Morse starts drinking when the pubs open and swallows his last dram before bed; and unlike the Hugh Grants of this world, Morse’s sarcasm isn’t there to amuse and titillate. Morse’s sarcasm is a slate-black irony directed at the God who isn’t there, the chaos that robs us of any chance of love and the meaninglessness of it all. As Nabokov pointed out, “the cradle rocks over the abyss” and for Morse the abyss is always with us. For a trillion years we’ll be dead until the universe itself dies in a whimpering heat death, our petty lives not even a glimmer of a spark in all that long grim durée. Morse knows that the only thing we can do is enjoy the achingly brief time we have. Following Epicurus, Morse says drink good beer, listen – really listen – to the best music, drive your car and relish it (easy if you’ve got a Mark 2 Jag), and if you can, try to salve the pain of the grief-stricken.
  “Yeah, I like Morse just as I like the English, but I’d like them better if Englishmen rejected the lines given them by Richard Curtis and rediscovered their old clichés: the stiff upper lip, coolness in a crisis, dry wit, and the broody imperiousness of Holmes, Marlowe (right) and Morse. The classic English detectives, like real Celts everywhere (and unlike poor foot-in-mouth Tilda Swinton) know when to talk and when to embrace the silence.” – Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty’s THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD is published by Serpent’s Tail