Cold Cold Comfort

I had an interview with Adrian McKinty (right) published in the Irish Examiner recently. It ran a lot like this:

Taboo or not taboo, that is the question. Adrian McKinty’s latest novel, THE COLD COLD GROUND, has for its backdrop one of the most contentious topics in recent Irish history, the IRA hunger strikes of 1981.
  “It is a taboo subject,” McKinty agrees. “In fact, the whole Troubles era is still a taboo. I had a conversation with a BBC NI producer once, we were discussing a potential commission. He was completely aghast when I told him that I wanted to do something about the Troubles. ‘That’s all behind us now, we want to look to the future,’ he said. Well, it isn’t behind me. I’ll never forget those days.
  “It’s also true,” he adds, “that if no one wants to talk about something, then that’s probably the very thing you should be talking about.”
  Born in 1968 in Carrickfergus, Co Antrim, McKinty grew up a child of the Troubles.
  “My memories of that time are so vivid that it was pretty easy coming up with material for the book,” he says. “For example, I used to get a lift to school from a neighbour who was a Major in the UDR. Every morning he would get down on his knees and check under his car for mercury-tilt bombs, and when he got the all-clear he would call my little brother, me and his son outside and we would get in the car and go to school. But then one day it was raining hard, and he decided just to skip it and called us out without checking under the car. Every week on the news you’d hear about a copper or a soldier, and sometimes their families, who were killed by a mercury-tilt device. So on that ride to school I literally thought I was going to die.”
  If you’re a writer, there are no such things as bad memories, only experiences to be retro-fitted for the sake of a story.
  “Of course,” he grins, “like the self-consuming novelist I am, I took the memory and put it in the book. But it was really an extraordinary time and the more I probed my own recollections, the more those gates opened. A lot of them were bad memories: the time I got knocked down by a police Land Rover in a hit-and-run, the fight I got into with a paramilitary hood and ended up with 18 stitches in my face, the time I planted a bullet in my sister’s handbag to see what would happen at a police checkpoint, our next door neighbour getting arrested for a triple homicide by seemingly half the British Army, bomb scares, bombs, riots … So, yeah, they sound like bad memories. But in many ways, they’re gold for a writer.”
  THE COLD COLD GROUND centres on Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy, who investigates a series of murders that appear to be the work of a killer taking advantage of the tensions created by the hunger strikes. As the name suggests, Sean Duffy is a Catholic. Why did McKinty, himself a Protestant, choose a Catholic RUC man for the hero of his book?
  “There were a couple of reasons,” he says. “I wanted Duffy to arrive in East Antrim as an outsider, and as an outsider he could cast a jaundiced eye on the toxic politics and culture of the area. And of course, I knew that as a Catholic Duffy would run right up against all the fault lines of the time, which would be tremendous material for a novelist. I grew up in a working class Protestant housing estate and I loved the idea of putting a cynical intellectual like Duffy in among those people. And as a Catholic copper, Duffy can never be completely comfortable in his own skin or in the company he keeps. His life is literally on the line every single day.
  “That he’s a Catholic in the RUC in 1981 would have been incredibly rare back then,” he says. “The IRA famously had a bounty on Catholic policemen and the RUC was completely distrusted by the Catholic community, so few joined. The force in that era would have been over 90% Protestant. So you’ve got a gifted but conflicted and fractured young man in a very hot-house environment.”
  McKinty has written six adult crime titles previous to THE COLD COLD GROUND (he also writes children’s fiction), but this is his first police procedural novel. Why the change in direction?
  “To be honest, I was never that enthused about the police procedural story,” he says, “but then I got to know Evan Hunter [Ed McBain] a little bit before he died, and I started reading his fantastic 87th precinct books and I gradually saw the possibilities of that type of book. What finally sold me was reading James Ellroy’s LA Quartet, which are fascinating takes on the procedural, and by then I knew that this was a genre I wanted to tackle.”
  THE COLD COLD GROUND blends the police procedural with a serial killer storyline, a rare development in the Irish crime novel, which has seen very few serial killer stories published despite the recent boom in Irish crime fiction.
  Is this because, officially at least, we have no record of a serial killer operating in Ireland?
  “I don’t know about the South,” says McKinty, “but in the North, serial killers just get absorbed into the paramilitaries. I knew several clearly deranged individuals who were high ranking paramilitaries. The Shankhill Butchers and Michael Stone are just a couple of examples of psychopaths who probably would have been ordinary, everyday serial killers had they grown up in a non-sectarian society.”
  McKinty currently lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and two daughters. Is it the case that he needed to travel to the other side of the planet before he could start writing about home?

  “I’m not sure I completely buy into this exilic notion that you have to leave a place to write about it,” says the author. “At the last stanza of TS Eliot’s Little Gidding, he says, “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Perhaps, but William Faulkner did a pretty good job writing about Oxford, Mississippi while living in Oxford, Mississippi his entire life.”
  McKinty’s novels have been very well received to date, particularly, and unusually, as audio books. The Dead Year (2007) won the ‘Audie’ for Best Thriller / Suspense Novel, while Audible.com chose last year’s offering Falling Glass as the Best Mystery / Thriller of 2011.
  “That’s all down to the narrator, I think,” says McKinty. “If you can get a good narrator, you’re in like Flynn. I’ve been fortunate with Gerard Doyle, who is incredibly popular and much sought after. I’m pretty sure if I’d done a Le Carré or a Douglas Adams and narrated the books myself, it would have been a complete disaster.”
  THE COLD COLD GROUND is being touted as the first of a proposed trilogy, and McKinty is looking forward to exploring Northern Ireland in the 1980s through DS Duffy’s eyes.
  “I’ve got so much material about that time and place and there are many more interesting places the character can go,” he says. “I’d love to get him in some kind of confrontation with the Thatcher government, for example, or get mixed up in the DeLorean disaster, or any number of things. And of course, musically, we’ll eventually have to get to his difficult ‘New Romantic’ years …”

  THE COLD COLD GROUND by Adrian McKinty is published by Serpent’s Tail.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE BERLIN CROSSING by Kevin Brophy

THE BERLIN CROSSING opens with a short prologue set in 1962, as an East German soldier on duty on the Berlin Wall shoots dead a man who is trying to cross the no-man’s land into West Berlin. Oddly, the man appears to smile as he dies.
  The story then moves forward to Brandenburg in 1993. The Berlin Wall has fallen, and many of the former GDR’s citizens resent the way in which their history is being written by West Germans, or ‘Wessies’. Michael Ritter, an English language teacher and a published author of a collection of short stories, ‘Workers’ Dawn’, is informed that his teaching contract won’t be renewed, largely in part because Ritter was a former Party member in the GDR and is seen as politically suspect in the newly unified Germany. Ritter has long detested the Westernisation of the former East Germany, and particularly the crass commercialism that has colonised his country, and his sacking only confirms his prejudices. Shortly afterwards, Ritter’s mother dies, sending Ritter off on a search for a Pastor Bruck of Bad Saarow with her dying words, which suggest that Pastor Bruck will be able to shed some light on the identity of the father Ritter has never known. Michael’s quest sends us back in time to 1962, when the novel takes on some of the tropes of the classic Cold War spy novel.
  This, the middle section of the novel, is why THE BERLIN CROSSING is being pitched in certain quarters as a thriller of the Le Carré variety, but I think it will become quickly obvious to any fan of the classic spy thrillers that that’s not the kind of novel Brophy had in mind. Certainly, he seems more than happy to play with the tropes and conventions of the spy novel - the secret service ‘spooks’ in London recruiting unwilling spies via blackmail; the East Berlin setting; the secretive missions, false identities and ‘dead letter’ drops; the sense of claustrophobia and paranoia - but any fan of Le Carré, Ambler et al will be underwhelmed by THE BERLIN CROSSING as a spy novel.
  For one thing, only the middle section, or ‘book’, can be considered a spy thriller. Secondly, and despite Brophy’s ability to recreate both a relatively modern Germany and its Cold War counterpart in East Berlin, the story does lack that quality of under-the-skin paranoia and claustrophobia that the great thriller writers bring to their work. It’s also true that there’s a lack of plausibility about the events that transpire in East Germany that would be highly unusual among the best practitioners of the spy novel.
  By the same token, I did get the impression that Brophy was incorporating these tropes into a novel that has other fish to fry. THE BERLIN CROSSING is, I think, fundamentally a novel about identity, and an individual’s attempt to find his place in a ceaselessly changing world. This search for identity is bound up in a love story set against the Cold War backdrop; it’s fair to say, I think, that the romantic aspect of the novel is equally, if not more, important to Brophy as the spy novel aspect.
  Michael Ritter is a fascinating character for his take on the East German experience of the newly unified Germany in 1992. It’s far more common to read of former East Germans who were terrorised and tortured, physically and / or psychologically, during this period of Germany’s history. Ritter, however, is proudly East German; he defends the GDR’s reputation and the means used to protect the country against its aggressors. Moreover, he’s disgusted by the blatant inequality caused by the influx of capital into East Germany.
  Equally interesting is the minor character of Pastor Bruck, whose presence pervades the novel like no other character apart from Michael Ritter himself. As a confirmed socialist and patriotic East German, Michael is suspicious of religion as the opium of the masses when he first meets the Pastor in Bad Saarow:

He and his kind had won; his miserable stained glass was a symbol not of survival but of loss. I could feel the hate welling inside me, inside the regret, boiling over it, swallowing the regret, swallowing me. I hated this grey cleric, this grey stone building. (pg 45)

  Soon, however, Michael is grudgingly accepting the sacrifice Pastor Bruck has made on behalf of his own family (the pastor has had his back broken by the Stasi). Later, Michael comes to realise that it is the Pastor’s Christian instinct that allows him to help Roland to escape from the Stasi in East Berlin. While Michael doesn’t become a convert to religion, he does come to accept the parallels between the Christian philosophy and the all-for-one basic tenet of his cherished socialism.
  There’s also a neat dovetailing between the religious aspect to the novel and that of its form as a kind of spy novel, given that the spy novel is generally about peeling back layers of deceit to get at a fundamental truth. Twice Brophy cites Pontius Pilate before Christ, the first being in the words of Pastor Bruck:

‘The old question, Herr Ritter.’ The smile almost sorrowful. ‘What is truth?’ And two thousand years after Pilate, we still cannot answer it.’ (pg 51, italics Brophy’s)

  In the latter stages of the novel, Pilate’s enquiry after truth is again cited, which suggests that Brophy wants to emphasise this particular point.
  Ultimately, Kevin Brophy has delivered an intriguing novel about identity that is loosely swaddled in the trappings of the spy novel. - Declan Burke

BLOODLAND: Has The Great Irish Novel Finally Arrived?

It’s fair to say that Alan Glynn is one of the most inventive and thoughtful Irish writers working today, and I was already looking forward to his forthcoming title, BLOODLAND, even before I read the Le Carré-meets-James Ellroy blurb. To wit:

A tabloid star is killed in a helicopter crash and three years later a young journalist is warned off the story. A private security contractor loses it in the Congo, with deadly consequences. In Ireland an ex-prime minister struggles to contain a dark secret from his time in office. A dramatic news story breaks in Paris just as a US senator begins his campaign to run for office. With echoes of John Le Carré, 24 and James Ellroy, Alan Glynn’s follow-up to WINTERLAND is another crime novel of and for our times – a ferocious, paranoid thriller that moves from Dublin to New York via Central Africa, and thrillingly explores the legacy of corruption in big business, the West’s fear of China, the role of back room political players and the question of who controls what we know.

  Sounds like a cracker, but stay! There’s more. Ken Bruen wades in with a cover blurb that runs thusly: “The debate is over - BLOODLAND is the great Irish novel, no argument.” - Ken Bruen
  Interesting, I think, that Ken Bruen doesn’t claim that BLOODLAND is the great Irish crime novel, but the great Irish novel. Is it the case that, given what Ireland has been through in the last number of years, the current generation of Irish writers are doomed to engage with crime and criminality? Is it that Alan Glynn doesn’t write conventional crime novels? Either way, Ken Bruen has just ratcheted up the expectations for BLOODLAND, which arrives on September 1st, by yet another notch or two …

UPDATE:

  A little birdie gets in touch, in the wake of this post, to tell us that a certain Val McDermid has read BLOODLAND, and appears to quite like it. To wit:

“Ripped from tomorrow’s headlines, BLOODLAND is irresistible. An exhilarating thriller from the dark heart of the global village.” - Val McDermid

  Very, very nice indeed …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: The Irish Times’ Crime Beat Round-Up

The latest of yours truly’s crime fiction review columns appeared in the Irish Times yesterday, featuring Stuart Neville, Tana French, Alan Furst, Karin Fossum, Ruth Rendell and James Patterson, among others. To wit:

Lennon Takes the Lead

In the context of Northern Ireland, ‘collusion’ is an ugly word denoting state-sponsored murder during the Troubles. In COLLUSION (Harvill Secker, £12.99, pb), Stuart Neville takes pains to illustrate the extent to which collusion ‘worked all ways, all directions’, and continues do so in the murky world of covert operations. Belfast Detective Inspector Jack Lennon, a minor character from Neville’s debut THE TWELVE, takes the lead here as he investigates the fall-out from the slaughter that accrued when ex-paramilitary Gerry Fegan went on the rampage. The novel has the page-turning quality of Neville’s debut, which recently won the LA Times’ Mystery / Thriller of the Year, but it’s Neville’s clear-eyed appraisal of the real-politik of the post-Ceasefire Northern Ireland that gives it real heft.
  In FAITHFUL PLACE (Hachette Books Ireland, £12.99, pb), Tana French also gives prominence to a minor character from a previous novel. Undercover cop Frank Mackey appeared in both IN THE WOODS and THE LIKENESS, but here he is the narrator, sucked back into his former life when the corpse of the girl he’d once planned to elope with to England is discovered on his old stomping ground, Faithful Place in inner city Dublin. As always, French is as exercised by the psychology of criminality as she is by the investigation of the mystery, and the result is a gripping, literate thriller laced with black humour.
  The latest in her Inspector Sejer series, Karin Fossum’s BAD INTENTIONS (Harvill Secker, £11.99, pb) is another novel that trades heavily in the psychology of the criminal mind. Fossum sets up a scenario in which no actual crime is committed when a young man steps off a boat into a lake, to subsequently drown, but explores instead the morality of those who were with him as they finesse the details to their own advantage. Tautly told in a crisp translation from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund, the story is a riveting exploration of the consequences of crime, a whydunit rather than the traditional whodunit.
  Two aging brothers are murdered within hours of one another in RIVER OF SHADOWS (MacLehose Press, £18.99, pb), the debut from Italian author Valerio Varesi. Commissario Soneri investigates against an atmospheric backdrop of a wintry northern Italy, as the Po floods its banks. The plot neatly explores the ramifications of the Italy’s internal Fascist-Communist struggle during WWII, and Joseph Farrell’s translation is appropriately poetic, but Soneri himself is rather less fascinating, being yet another in a long line of urbane, sybaritic Italian detectives. Surely there are Italian policeman who are not obsessed with their stomachs?
  Equally atmospheric is Alan Furst’s SPIES OF THE BALKANS (W&N, £18.99, hb), the 11th in his ‘Night Soldiers’ novels, which are set in Eastern Europe prior to and during WWII. Set in Salonika in 1940, undercover policeman Costa Zannis awaits the inevitable invasion of Greece by Italian forces, and finds himself drawn into establishing an underground railway for Jewish refugees fleeing Germany. The literary style belies a deftly paced plot in an old-fashioned spy thriller more reminiscent of John Le Carré and Graham Greene than Ian Fleming. Highly recommended.
  Jeff Lindsay’s DEXTER IS DELICIOUS (Orion, £12.99, hb) is the fifth in his series about a homicidal Florida psychopath who harnesses his urges and only kills for the good of society. The twist here is that Dexter, who can barely describe himself as human, has his entire life overthrown when his wife gives birth to a baby daughter. Struggling to deal with emotions for the first time, Dexter has to deal with the appearance of his equally homicidal brother, all the while helping to investigate what appears to be a cannibalism spree. Lashings of gallows humour help to sugar the pill, but even though the tale moves swiftly towards its climax, it’s difficult to ignore the nagging thought that Dexter might well have outlived his novelty.
  DON’T BLINK (Century, £18.99, hb) is the latest offering from James Patterson, co-written with Howard Roughan. Magazine journalist Nick Daniels is plunged into peril when he goes to interview a former baseball player at a New York restaurant, only to witness the Mafia lawyer at the next table get his eyes gouged out. The usual Patterson tropes of very short chapters and cliff-hanger endings help to move the action along at a furious pace, but the characters couldn’t have been more crudely drawn had Patterson and Roughan used crayons and cardboard. The story somehow manages to be utterly implausible and entirely predictable, and has all the literary merit of a laundry list. If you’re in the mood for a migraine, this is the book for you.
  Ruth Rendell is one of the few authors who can claim to be as prolific as the James Patterson factory, although, despite publishing her first novel in 1964, she has yet to learn how to pander to her readers. TIGERLILY’S ORCHIDS (Hutchinson, £18.99, hb) features a host of characters, all of whom live in or near the flats of Lichfield House in north London, most of whom have their lives impacted by a number of crimes that occur in the locality, ranging in seriousness from identity theft to marijuana farming to murder. It’s by no means a conventional crime novel; in fact, it’s much more a social novel that incorporates criminal activity. That the tale succeeds brilliantly on both levels is due to Rendell’s telling eye for detail when it comes to characterisation, a quietly elegant style, an acerbic take on modern Britain and an irrepressible delight in storytelling that results in a novel bursting at the seams with ideas, narrative digressions and twists and turns that are as heartbreaking as they are unexpected. In a nutshell, a wonderfully satisfying novel. - Declan Burke

  This article first appeared in The Irish Times

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: J. Sydney Jones

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?
Can we stretch it to thrillers? HARRY’S GAME, by Gerald Seymour. He can do dialogue and pacing like no other. Or perhaps Le Carré’s A MURDER OF QUALITY. Ditto the dialogue. You can almost taste it.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Prince Myshkin. He runs under the radar.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Guilty as accused: mysteries and thrillers.

Most satisfying writing moment?
I’ve published a dozen books over the years, but getting my first royalty check for my narrative history, HITLER IN VIENNA, thirty years after publication was definitely a high point. No lie. That book was sold I don’t know how many times from the German original, translated, sold in revised editions (without my blessings) and I never saw a dime. Only financials for years were the photo rights I had to pay for with each new edition. But patience pays out. I now can afford five bottles of plonk.

No. On second thoughts, I believe I will frame the check.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst is promotion - endless, ceaseless (is it even productive?) promotion. The best is that feeling of getting it right, nailing a scene or character with exactly the right words.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Here’s for book four of my Viennese Mysteries series, set around 1900: THE KEEPER OF THE HANDS is a murder mystery that quickly morphs into a thriller of assumed names, false identities, and internecine turf battles between espionage arms of the state, employing the technology and tradecraft of a century ago. It is also a work of social and political commentary in which the demands of state power trump the privacy of its citizens, a scenario that is prescient of our own times.

Who are you reading right now?
Perhaps this is my guilty pleasure: I always have several books going at the same time, fiction and nonfiction. Nabokov’s SPEAK MEMORY, THE AGE OF WONDER by Richard Holmes, and Jonathan Littel’s THE KINDLY ONES.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Neither. Don’t believe in God.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
I’m breaking the rules (so I can’t count, so sue me) and quoting from Kirkus about my last novel, REQUIEM IN VIENNA: “Sophisticated entertainment of a very high caliber.”

J. Sydney Jones’ THE EMPTY MIRROR is published by Minotaur Books.

Brain Candy

Just in case you thought we were over-stating the case just a tad last week in our review of neurologist Liam Durcan’s (right) rather fine debut novel GARCIA’S HEART, we herewith present a selection of big-ups and hup-yas from Durcan’s Canadian hinterland, to wit:

“Engrossing. . . . Durcan doesn’t offer any easy answers in this searching, meticulously observed novel of moral complexity. He does offer plenty to think about.” — Toronto Star

“Lucid and subtle. . . . Durcan has crafted an entertaining and convincing portrayal of a man awkwardly perched atop a precipice of identities and histories on the verge of collapse.” — Montreal Review of Books

“Stunningly well-written. . . . Durcan writes the way one imagines a brain surgeon employs his tools — with strength to cut through bone and feather-light delicacy to excise minute strands of tissue. Durcan’s style is a mixture of precision and playfulness, irony and moral seriousness reminiscent of British master Ian McEwan, or even a slightly restrained Martin Amis … A remarkable accomplishment.” — Winnipeg Free Press

“With this remarkable debut novel, Liam Durcan … has firmly ensconced himself within the hallowed ranks of doctors making successful forays into literature, a line running straight from Chekov through William Carlos Williams and W. Somerset Maugham to, most recently, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Vincent Lam. . . .There are evocations of Ian McEwan’s SATURDAY here . . . Durcan beats McEwan at his own game by resisting the tendency to show off and, in doing so, produces a restrained, artfully paced work built around its central ethical question, which is not so much “what is evil?” as “what, exactly, is the nature of good?” — Quill & Quire (starred review)

“Like a cross between John le Carré and Ian McEwan – GARCIA’S HEART, treads the line between an elegant, elegiac novel of ideas and a sophisticated political thriller. It was exciting, intellectually compelling, and beautifully written. It was also that rarest of books: A literary work with an intensely humanistic core. I am so happy to have discovered Liam Durcan; he will be a major writer for years to come.” — Pauls Toutonghi

“Eloquent and haunting, GARCIA’S HEART fearlessly explores the moral ambiguities of the modern world. Durcan demonstrates his supreme versatility with this psychologically penetrating, technically assured, yet empathic and human portrait of a man struggling to come to terms with a terrible angel.” — Eden Robinson,

“In his debut novel, Liam Durcan skilfully performs complex forensic procedures: autopsies on mysteriously damaged hearts, brain scans on characters whose deepest thoughts remain beyond diagnosis. Throughout, Durcan writes with operating room precision. A grim, gripping, confident, and provocative book.” — Steven Heighton

“Liam Durcan raises complex and important issues in GARCIA’S HEART, exposing the frailty of human nature against the background of medical science. It’s an intelligent book, thought-provoking and satisfying — a meditation on the workings of the mind. I found myself thinking about it for a long time afterwards.” — Clare Morrall

So, there you have it. Liam Durcan. GARCIA’S HEART. Make yourself happy, people …