Good Day At Black Rock

I know that true success, according to Gore Vidal and others, means that you triumph while your friends fail, but I can’t help feeling more than a little bit pleased to see Canadian author John McFetridge on the cover of Quill & Quire. He’s a smashing bloke and a terrific writer; and his latest offering, BLACK ROCK (ECW), is a brilliant period crime thriller set in Montreal in 1970. If I were you, I’d jump on that bandwagon before it hauls on out of the station …

Mc vs Mc: The Spinetingler Awards

I find myself in something of a bind courtesy of the good folks at Spinetingler Magazine. Their annual Award nominees have just been announced, and John McFetridge and Adrian McKinty have been pitched in against one another in the ‘Rising Star / Legend’ category in what amounts to a (koff) duel nomination. The trouble being, you’re only allowed to vote for one nominee in each category. So – vote for McKinty’s THE COLD COLD GROUND, or McFetridge’s TUMBLIN’ DICE? Hmmmm. I may need to consult the chicken entrails on this one.
  It’s a tough category, by the way. To wit:

The 2013 Spinetingler Award Best Novel: Rising Star/Legend

Capture by Roger Smith
The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty
Dare Me by Megan Abbott
Edge of Dark Water by Joe R. Lansdale
Kings of Cool by Don Winslow
Lake Country by Sean Doolittle
The Last Kind Words by Tom Piccirilli
Live By Night by Dennis Lehane
Tumblin’ Dice by John McFetridge
What it Was by George Pelecanos

  The very best of luck to all involved. For the full list of categories and nominees in the Spinetingler Awards, clickety-click here …

Zero Hour: An Invitation To The Launch Of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL

Zero hour approaches, folks. The date for the official launch of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL (Liberties Press) has been set, and it’s August 10th, at the award-winning Gutter Bookshop, Temple Bar, Dublin. The Dark Lord, aka John Connolly, has been good enough to agree to crack a metaphorical bottle of champagne against AZC’s bows, although given the extent of the Dark Lord’s dominions, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he didn’t have to rush off somewhere in the meantime to suppress an uprising by disaffected minions, and thus miss out on the dubious honour of being personally associated with yours truly’s humble tome.
  Anyway, August 10th at the Gutter Bookshop, with John Connolly sprinkling his inimitable brand of fairy dust, is the plan for now, and here’s hoping it all comes off.
  It should go without saying, of course - although I’ll say it anyway - that you are all invited along. If you can make it, I’d be delighted and humbled in equal measure.
  For those of you new to these pages, the back-page blurb of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL runs thusly:

Who in their right mind would want to blow up a hospital?
  “Close it down, blow it up – what’s the difference?”
  Billy Karlsson needs to get real. Literally. A hospital porter with a sideline in euthanasia, Billy is a character trapped in the purgatory of an abandoned novel. Deranged by logic, driven beyond sanity, Billy makes his final stand: if killing old people won’t cut the mustard, the whole hospital will have to go up in flames.
  Only his creator can stop him now, the author who abandoned Billy to his half-life limbo, in which Billy schemes to do whatever it takes to get himself published, or be damned . . .

  “ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL is unlike anything else you’ll read this year … Laugh-out-loud funny … This is writing at its dazzling, cleverest zenith. Think John Fowles, via Paul Auster and Rolling Stone … a feat of extraordinary alchemy.” – Ken Bruen, author of AMERICAN SKIN

  For a variety of other writers’ opinions on ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, including those of John Banville, Reed Farrel Coleman, Melissa Hill, Colin Bateman, Deborah Lawrenson, Adrian McKinty, John McFetridge, Scott Philips and Donna Moore, clickety-click on the AZC cover to your left.
  And there you have it. Here’s hoping I’ll see you all on August 10th …

My Top Ten Crime Novels: Declan Burke

It’s not a book I hear mentioned a lot these days, but Alistair MacLean’s WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL is one of my favourite crime thrillers, and one I tend to indulge myself with a re-read every couple of years. Yes, I know MacLean isn’t exactly hip anymore, but, well, hip schmip. It’s a very neat piece of Bond pastiche / parody / homage, with the added bonus - by Ian Fleming’s standards, at least - of being unusually realistic for a thriller, and the setting of the west coast of Scotland is hugely atmospheric, possibly because it’s always raining.
  I first read WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL in my mid-teens, and it was hugely influential on me. I particularly liked the deadpan stoicism and ever-so-slightly knowing first-person narration delivered by the ‘hero’, the put-upon but resourceful spook Calvert. When my first novel appeared, people were generous enough to favourably mention the blatant Chandleresque rip-off, and some even mentioned John D. MacDonald and Jim Thompson (the latter due to the epigraph I used, probably), but even moreso than Chandler, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE was heavily influenced by Colin Bateman’s DIVORCING JACK and Alistair MacLean’s WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL - hence the ‘EIGHT’ in EIGHTBALL BOOGIE. To wit:

WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL by Alistair MacLean
I’m not normally a fan of thrillers, but when I read this at a young age it seemed to me a low-fi James Bond novel, and all the more enjoyable for it. In fact, it’s Bond laced with Chandlerisms, set in a superbly drawn Scottish landscape of islands, crags, inlets and castles, and combines the page-turning quality of the high-concept thriller with a grittily realistic spy tale reminiscent of Le Carré.

  Anyway, the reason I mention WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL is that the good people at Book Aware asked me to contribute my Top Ten Crime Novels to their list, as flagged earlier this week by Ken Bruen’s Top Ten Crime Novels. For the full list of my own Top Ten, which includes James Ellroy, Adrian McKinty, John McFetridge, Jim Thompson, The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman and Barry Gifford, clickety-click on Book Aware here …
  Book Aware is hosting a series of such lists, with the aim of supporting Sightsavers, which has the vision of ‘a world where no one is blind from avoidable causes and where visually impaired people participate equally in society. Help Sightsavers help people enjoy the world of books too.’ Any writers wishing to help out Book Aware and Sightsavers by contributing their own Top Ten Favourite Novels should contact Neil at neil(at)galwayprint.ie.

The Baby Killers: Good Times For A Change

“Good times for a change / See, the luck I’ve had / Can make a good man turn bad …” I don’t invoke those mopey depressmeisters The Smiths very often on these pages, but believe it or not, it is, and for once, good times and good news at Crime Always Pays. As all Three Regular Readers will be aware, I’ve been struggling for quite a while now to get my latest opus, THE BABY KILLERS, aka BAD FOR GOOD, published. There have been ups and downs along the way, and many pleasant rejection letters to peruse, and much by way of support from those of you who wander by here once in a while; indeed, there was much love last year for my proposal to self-publish the book via ‘crowd-sourcing’, with all (any) profits being donated to charity.
  But lo! It has come to pass that a small but perfectly formed Irish publisher has made an offer to publish THE BABY KILLERS. The deal proposed is also small but perfectly formed, to the extent that it’s fair to say that my plan of buying a Greek island will have to be deferred until the publication of my next book, at the very least. I do like the publishing model, though. It’s based on small print runs, firm sales (i.e., no sale-or-return), and a commitment to no-frills publishing of quality, quirky books for readers with an appetite for books that don’t necessarily conform to mainstream publishing’s idea of a commercial prospect. All of which is music to my ears.
  Now, the deal wouldn’t necessarily appeal to every writer. For one, there’s no advance involved, which effectively means that I’m giving away my book for free. Given that I was planning to self-publish it anyway, that’s not an issue for me; far better that the book, which was gathering dust on the shelf, be published without earning an advance than not published at all, or cost me to publish, particularly in these straitened times. It also removes the pressure of earning out the advance, and / or feeling indebted to a publisher.
  In effect, the deal will accomplish everything I wanted to achieve through self-publishing, with many added benefits, the most important of which are that the publisher already has a good reputation for publishing interesting books, and that the publisher also absorbs the cost of publication, and provides the distribution and - crucially - the experience.
  For my own part, I get to see a beautifully produced (if the publisher’s previous offerings are anything to go by) book of mine on the shelf, and to feel a little less of a charlatan when I mumble that I’m a writer in my spare time. Equally important, I get to fulfil that commitment I made to the Three Regular Readers last year, of donating all royalties from the book’s publication to charity. Given the content of the book, and the fact that the story revolves around a sociopathic hospital porter’s plot to blow up the hospital where he works, the charity to benefit will mostly likely be that of a children’s wing of a local hospital.
  So that’s it in a nutshell. Contracts have yet to be issued and details formalised, so it’s only fair that I mention no names as of yet. I have to say, though, that I’m hugely energised right now, enthusiastic and upbeat. Suddenly, naively, everything seems possible again.
  The early word, in terms of blurbs at least, has been good. To wit:

“A genuinely original take on noir, inventive and funny. Imagine, if you can, a cross between Flann O’Brien and Raymond Chandler.” – John Banville, author of THE SEA

“If you want to find something new and challenging, comic crime fiction is now the place to go … Declan Burke [is] at the vanguard of a new wave of young writers kicking against the clichés and producing ambitious, challenging, genre-bending works.” Colin Bateman, author of THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL

“THE BABY KILLERS is unlike anything else you’ll read this year … Laugh-out-loud funny … This is writing at its dazzling, cleverest zenith. Think John Fowles, via Paul Auster and Rolling Stone … a feat of extraordinary alchemy.” – Ken Bruen, author of AMERICAN SKIN

“Burke has written a deep, lyrical and moving crime novel … an intoxicating and exciting novel of which the master himself, Flann O’Brien, would be proud.” – Adrian McKinty, author FIFTY GRAND

“Stop waiting for Godot – he’s here. Declan Burke takes the existential dilemma of characters writing themselves and turns it on its ear, and then some. He gives it body and soul … an Irish soul.” – Reed Farrel Coleman, author of EMPTY EVER AFTER

“THE BABY KILLERS is shockingly original and completely entertaining. Post-modern crime fiction at its very best.” – John McFetridge, author of EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE

“A harrowing and yet hilarious examination of the gradual disintegration of a writer’s personality, as well as a damned fine noir novel … Burke has outdone himself this time; it’s a hell of a read.” – Scott Philips, author of THE ICE HARVEST

  So there you have it. The plan is to publish THE BABY KILLERS later this year, with attendant trumpet blasts and the strewing of garlands. In the meantime, and if the spirit so moves you, feel free to pre-order a copy by leaving your name and a contact email address (using (at) rather than @ to confound the spam monkeys) in the comment box below.
  Finally, and at the risk of sounding mawkish, I’d like to thank everyone who has ever expressed an interest in this book. It’s people like you who make all the difference, who give writers like me that most elusive and precious of all commodities in this writing game - hope. God bless you, every one.

The World: Gone To Hell In A Hand-Basket, Apparently

I had a piece published in the Irish Times yesterday, the gist of it concerned with the development of the crime novel in settings and countries not necessarily associated with the traditional haunts of crime fiction. To wit:

How the World Became One Big Crime Scene

From the Palestinian Territories to Mongolia and beyond, crime writers are using international locations to tackle global themes

The popular perception of crime fiction is that it’s the foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, black sheep of the literary family. Unsurprisingly, it’s quite popular with the ladies, perhaps as a result of the broad mind it has developed on its travels.
  The success of Stieg Larsson’s Sweden-set ‘Millennium Trilogy’ has alerted mainstream readers to the fact that the crime novel has an existence beyond its traditional enclaves of America and the UK. Larsson, of course, is following in the footsteps of his countryman Henning Mankell, while ‘foreign’ settings for crime novels are nothing new for aficionados au fait with the groundbreaking works of Georges Simenon (France) and Sjöwall and Wahlöö (Sweden), and latterly the likes of Andrea Camilleri (Italy), Colin Cotterill (Cambodia), Michael Dibdin (Italy), Jo Nesbø (Norway) and Deon Meyer (South Africa), to mention but a few.
  Three years ago, writing in the New Yorker, Clive James celebrated international crime fiction offerings from Ireland, Scandinavia and Italy while simultaneously deriding the limitations of the genre’s form. “In most of the crime novels coming out now,” he said, “it’s a matter not of what happens but of where. Essentially, they are guide books.”
  What James failed to recognise is that the crime novel, by virtue of engaging with issues of law and (dis)order in a timely and relevant fashion, tends to be at the cutting edge in terms of addressing society’s fundamental concerns and broaching its taboos.
  Per Wahlöö, for example, claimed that the motive behind the ten-book Martin Beck series written with his wife was to “use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type.”
  Peeling back layers of cant and perceived wisdom is a theme that writers are currently exploring in settings as diverse as Canada, Poland, the Palestinian Territories, Brazil, South Africa and Mongolia.
  “Toronto has been proud of its label as one the most multi-ethnic cities in the world for the past twenty years or so,” says John McFetridge (right), whose Let It Ride is set in Canada’s great melting-pot city. “There’s been some great literature written here, but there hasn’t been much written about crime. And there’s been plenty of crime. Almost everything in my books is inspired by real events, from the closed brewery turned into a giant marijuana grow-op to the beauty queen pulling armed robberies at spas, to eight members of a gang killed in one night. I wanted to write what I saw going on in my city that not many people were talking about.”
  Mike Nicol, the author of Killer Country, is one of a new breed of South African writers inspired by Deon Meyer. “During apartheid the only fiction was literary fiction,” he says. “It was believed to have the seriousness that our political condition demanded. So there was no crime fiction – or almost none, although there were some very good novels from James McClure and Wessel Ebersohn.
  “After the end of Nelson Mandela’s presidency in 1999 it became obvious that the new government wasn’t terribly different from the old government. Apartheid was gone but the politicians remained politicians. There was widespread cronyism, fraud, corruption, embezzlement within government, collusion between cops and gangsters, a collapse in the education system, a collapse in the health sector as AIDS denialism became a national policy, and an unhealthy relationship developed between the private sector and the public sector that was a mixture of threat and bribery. As a crime writer, I felt I was back in business.”
  Matt Benyon Rees (right), a journalist, sets his Omar Yussef series of novels in the Palestinian Territories in order to humanise the newspaper headlines. “I wanted to show the Palestinians - whom we all think we know from daily news reports - as they are and to make readers realize that they didn’t really know them at all. Detective fiction is perfect for such a manoeuvre because it requires readers to examine very closely what’s happening in the story - there’s not much room for gloss. When it’s placed in a foreign culture, the reader’s attention has to be that much closer and the writer has to look again at every element of his descriptions.
  “Fiction, strangely, is a much better way of getting at the truths of a foreign culture than political analysis,” he continues. “Politics and journalism are based around liars and those who observe liars at work but often neglect to point out that the liars are lying. Fiction can’t lie.”
  The classic dramatic conflict between have and have-nots forms the backdrop to Leighton Gage’s Chief Inspector Mario Silva novels, which are set in Brazil.
  “Brazil is a rich country,” he says, “but it’s still a developing country. As such, it continues to have highly inequitable income distribution. That’s changing, and changing rapidly, but it’s still true that this country’s taboos (unlike the ones Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler et al had to contend with) can vary immensely depending upon where you stand in the socioeconomic pecking order. Forcing one of your children into prostitution is repugnant, for example, but there’s no taboo against it if the alternative is to let your other children starve.
  “That’s an extreme case, obviously, but Brazil is full of societal issues that don’t arise in so-called First World countries. Liberation theology, for example, has been condemned by the Princes of the Church, but many of Brazil’s poorer priests practice it. Excessive concentration on the promise of reward in heaven, they say, often propagates social injustice on earth. So, at one end of the scale, a defence of liberation theology is taboo. And, at the other end, not embracing it is equally taboo. How could I possibly live here, be a writer, and not want to tell people what a fascinating place this is?”
  Michael Walters sets his Nergui novels in the former Soviet satellite of Mongolia.
  “I’m not exactly exploring ‘societal taboos’,” he says, “but writing about a society which is still in the process of trying to work out exactly what its values (and therefore taboos) ought to be. The relationship between ‘legality’ and ‘morality’ is sometimes far from clear. In my first book, for example, I was trying to work out the links between individual murder and corporate crime, and the way in which, in a society desperate for economic growth, the corporations can sometimes, maybe even literally, get away with murder. In my second, I was looking to explore the difficulty of trying to establish legitimate law enforcement in a society where corruption is endemic and, historically, the word ‘police’ has usually been preceded by the word ‘secret’.”
  “In a pretentious mode,” Walters says, “I’d quote the line from Gramsci: ‘The old is dying, the new is struggling to be born and in the period of interregnum there arise many morbid symptoms.’ That’s a pretty good description of some aspects of Mongolia. The ‘morbid symptoms’, of course, make perfect material for crime fiction.” - Declan Burke

  This feature first appeared in the Irish Times.

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Downloads

All three regular readers of CAP will be aware that John McFetridge (right) is a terrific writer, or at least good enough to be dubbed ‘the Canadian Elmore Leonard’, which is good enough for me and should be good enough for you too. His current novel is titled SWAP or LET IT RIDE, depending on which jurisdiction you find yourself, but he’s also just released a long short story via Smashwords, called ‘East Coast’. It’s free to download to the viewing mechanism of your choice here, with the frammis kicking off thusly:

Bangor, Maine

They called it the New England States-Maritime Provinces Narcotics Officers Drinking Club, a couple hundred cops taking over the entire Days Inn off the I-95 just outside Bangor for the weekend. By Saturday night they had a barbeque set up by the pool, the no glass rule was long gone and the saunas were co-ed. Music blasted, country mostly, a little R’n’B when the Fed from Boston got near the system.
  The idea was an informal exchange of information. Rumours, innuendo, which dealers were on their way up, who was bringing in larger shipments, who was the biggest pain in the ass, who was most likely to get killed. All that stuff that couldn’t go in official reports, stuff that wouldn’t ever see the inside of a courtroom but stuff that would be good if the cops on both sides of the world’s longest unprotected border were aware.
  In room 202 Staff Sergeant Jerry Northup, the highest ranking RCMP officer on the trip, laid his cards on the table and said, “Even in Canada we call that a full house.”
  “You got a lot of time up there to play cards, don’t you?”
  Northup pulled in the chips and winked at Sherriff Cousins from Worcester, saying, “Oh yeah, you know us, we’ve got no crime we just sit around in our igloos practicing moose calls and playing poker.”
  “You’re in my backyard now.”
  Jerry said, you know it, and dealt another hand. The room’s bed had been pushed out into the hall to make room for the table brought up from the restaurant, six cops sitting around it, maybe a thousand bucks would change hands. It was all in fun.


One floor down a naked Constable Evelyn Edwards was on top of a DEA guy from Portland, Maine, both of them very close, and her phone started beeping and the DEA guy said, “Whoa, you’re not going to answer that,” and she said, yeah, I have to, “I’m on duty.”
  “You’re five hundred miles out of your jurisdiction, you’re in another God damn country.”
  She was beside the bed then pulling her phone out of her jeans in the pile of clothes on the floor saying, we couldn’t all get the weekend off, then into the phone, “Edwards ... Yes, un-huh, wow, really?” She shook her head and the DEA guy knew they weren’t going to finish any time soon.
  Edwards pulled on her sweatshirt and jeans and took off barefoot out of the room saying she’d be back and the DEA guy saw her bra and panties on the floor beside her running shoes and thought, hey, maybe they would finish.


In the poker room Sheriff Cousins was raking a pot, a big one, saying he knew his luck was going change when Edwards walked in out of breath, all the guys looking at her messed up hair and she said, “Sergeant Northup,” and Jerry said, “Hey Ev, you looking to lose some money?”
  “No sir, it’s about, it’s Superintendent Bergeron.”
  Jerry looked at his cards and said, Henry? What now, “Did he lock himself out of the office again?”
  Cousins laughed like he knew all about that kind of boss and Edwards said, no sir.
  “He died, sir.”
  Jerry leaned back in his chair and looked at her. Shit.
  Party’s over …

The Lone Ranger and Toronto

Canada is justifiably lauded for many things, but gritty urban noir isn’t one of them. Unless, of course, you’re one of the cognoscenti who’s read John McFetridge’s (pictured right, in classic ‘having cake and eating it’ mode) ‘Dirty Sweet’ (2006) and ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’ (2007). Pared-down tales of Toronto’s dark underbelly, the novels have been favourably compared with Elmore Leonard’s Detroit-set stories for their smartly observed characters, sharp dialogue, and a willingness to go beyond simplistic characterisations to explore the complex nature of crime and criminality.
  His latest offering was published last year in Canada as ‘Swap’, but arrives in the US bearing the title ‘Let It Ride’. It’s his best novel yet, a distillation of the elements that made the previous novels such compelling reading, and yet it’s a complex story of interwoven motivations that virtually defies a synopsis. John? Can you tell us what it’s all about in fifty words or less?
  “My publisher would love it if I could,” he laughs. “It’s about how relationships change over time, how the balance of power shifts ... It’s about an ex-marine who comes to Toronto from Detroit to set up a supply line for drugs from a guy he met in Afghanistan who’s now a member of a biker gang. And he meets a woman who’s robbing spas and wants to rob the bikers. And there are cops ...”
  Before John McFetridge, Toronto revelled in the name of ‘Toronto the Good’. Is it true that he’s personally responsible for the steep rise in Toronto crime statistics? Is it even safe to visit Toronto these days?
  “Yes, this is true, the only crime in Toronto is in books, otherwise it really is New York run by the Swiss. No crime, clean streets, all the people friendly all the time. Honestly, though, almost everything that happens in my books has its roots in something that actually happened here, from the closed-down brewery being used as a giant grow-op to the eight bikers killed in one night, to the highest ranking narcotics officers on the Toronto police being arrested for drug dealing.”
  As in all good crime writing, McFetridge’s tales explore how conventional notions of street-level criminality impacts on all strata of society, a pervasive poison that goes right to the top of the power structure. Is there a moral dimension to writing that kind of fiction? Or is crime fiction purely an entertainment that reflects the world we live in?
  “If it accurately reflects the world we live in,” he says, “then I think that’s the moral dimension. I try to show the circumstances that allow the criminals to operate, the ways that they justify criminal behaviour to themselves as being just business, and the internal politics and the restrictions on the police that make it difficult to catch these guys. Any conclusions are up to the reader.”
  McFetridge gets compared to Elmore Leonard quite a lot. Does that ever get boring?
  “It’s certainly not boring yet, though he must be getting tired of the number of writers being compared to him. I think it’s a style of writing that’s almost a genre of its own by now. I think of it starting with Hemingway and short stories like ‘The Killers’ and ‘Fifty Grand’ and then maybe it split into crime and literary with Elmore Leonard, and everyone who gets compared to him in the crime camp, and people like Richard Ford and Raymond Carver in the literary camp.”
  Are there any writers who make him you bite his fingers with envy?
  “Lots. So many. And the great thing is there are more all the time, every year more writers come out with debut books that are so good.”
  That said, McFetridge is of the opinion that there should be more good writers getting published every year.
  “I know of a few very good writers,” he says, “who’ve had a number of books published, who are having trouble finding a publisher for their new work. More and more I see any book that falls outside the easy description, that’s difficult to categorize or take risks - all the things that literature should do - having trouble finding a publisher. I can understand the employees of the publishing companies having bosses to answer to who have shareholders to answer to, so the drive becomes the most amount of profit in the shortest time above all else, but that mentality isn’t really the roots of publishing.”
  To that end, McFetridge has recently taken the radical step of setting up a writers’ co-operative organisation.
  “The idea is a kind of novelists version of the original United Artists,” he says, “a company run by the artists. Democracy sounds like a great idea but it’s messy and hard to work on a day-to-day basis, but I’d like to try. If the co-op members are all people who love books and who love literature and that’s their main priority, then I think it’s possible they could do great things. I’m not suggesting it be a non-profit organization (at least not on purpose) but that the drive for the most amount of profit possible not be the main decision making factor all the time.”
  It’s a fascinating concept, especially given the technological advances of recent years, which should in theory make it a lot easier for writers to connect with readers while minimising the number of middle-men involved in the process. For more info, clickety-click here ...
  Meanwhile, do yourself a favour and check out John McFetridge’s superb ‘Let It Ride’. If its quality is anything to go by, Toronto’s Lone Ranger won’t be riding away into the sunset any time soon.

  This article was first published in Crimespree Magazine.

Gonz, Baby, Gonz

A strange old week, folks. First off, heartfelt thanks to everyone who left a comment on the post below, and those of you who got in touch privately, promising to pledge money should I decide to go ahead and self-publish BAD FOR GOOD / A GONZO NOIR. The reaction was, for me, phenomenal: I’d have been delighted with twenty or so responses, and over the moon with thirty. To achieve more than double that gives me serious pause for thought, especially as so many people made multiple pledges (or pledged for multiple books). What began as a whimsical notion is now a practical option. But there’s more to it than hard cash. For someone struggling to have themselves heard, as most writers seem to be, that kind of support is literally invaluable.
  What I need to do now is spend some time researching the project meticulously, ensuring my figures are right, investigating the amount of time and energy the project will consume, and – most importantly – ensuring that there’s no possible glitch that could result in someone making a pledge and not receiving a book.
  I also need to take on board more experienced voices than I, some of whom have cautioned against the amount of work involved in self-publishing, which will by necessity eat into my own writing time; some have very kindly suggested that BAD FOR GOOD / A GONZO NOIR is too good to ‘waste’ on self-publishing; while others have stated in no uncertain terms that self-publishing at this point in my ‘career’ (koff) would prove hugely detrimental in the long term. Now, I’m not sure how much more detrimental a self-published book could be when compared with no published books at all, but the advice was well-intentioned and has been accepted as such. I’ll keep you all posted as to how it’s panning out; and again, many thanks for all the support.
  Meanwhile, in a not-unrelated matter, John McFetridge has taken my tentative suggestion about starting up a writers’ co-op and given it legs. In fact, he’s started a writer’s co-op, established a website, and already there seems to be a real buzz building around it. Seems to me that the real gonzo noir could well be coming together as we speak; I’ll be getting behind the project 100%. For more details, clickety-click here …
  Finally, I got an early look at ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ movie this week. I’m one of the very few people, apparently, who wasn’t overly impressed with the novel (I didn’t make it past page 120), but I tried to set that aside for the duration of the movie. What struck me most forcibly about it was how quaint it all seemed, if not old-fashioned: the wealthy industrialist Vanger commissioning Blomkist to investigate the disappearance of his niece was in effect the opening chapter of THE BIG SLEEP; the island where the disappearance took place has only one bridge in or out, making it a locked-room mystery; at one point, Blomkvist is called into a drawing room before the extended Vanger family, and I half-expected the (Nazi) Col. Mustard to be denounced as the killer, the foul deed taking place in the library, with a spanner. Apparently Stieg Larsson dotted the novel with references to Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, et al, which suggests that the book is intended as an homage to the Golden Age of mystery writing; that’s all very well and good, but it hardly makes for cutting-edge fiction, nor movie. Michael Nyqvist, playing Blomkvist, is a terrific actor, and acquits himself very well, but I found it hard to believe in the chemistry between he and Lisbeth Salander; indeed, I found the character of Salander entirely artificial, an impenetrable and unlovely IT idiot savant given sullenness, body piercing and chain-smoking in lieu of any real rebellion. For a movie that runs almost two and a half hours (quite long for a movie thriller), there’s precious little by way of depth of characterisation; meanwhile, the most interesting aspect of the story, the establishment of a pro-Nazi organisation in neutral Sweden during WWII, was given only a cursory nod, just enough to taint the bad guys with evil. The story also suffers from the usual faults associated with the gifted amateur sleuth: despite the fact that the local cop has spent 40 years obsessing on the disappearance of Vanger’s niece, for example, Blomkvist finds a new lead almost immediately on taking the case; and it still makes no sense that an obscenely wealthy man, who could afford any investigator on the planet, would choose to employ a man whose name has been very publicly disgraced for getting his facts wrong. As for the more modern aspects of the movie: there’s a nasty and graphic scene involving Salander that leaves a bad taste in the mouth, all the more so that it’s unnecessary in terms of establishing character; and there’s far too much emphasis (not to mention trust) placed on the internet as a source of ‘clues’ whenever the story needs to be shunted along.
  And that’s my two cents.

  This week I have been mostly reading: CLOUD ATLAS by David Mitchell (superb); THE MERCHANT OF VENICE by William Shakespeare; NAMING THE BONES by Louise Welch; and EARTH IN UPHEAVAL by Immanuel Velikovsky.

Show Me The Money; Or, Putting The ‘Fun’ Into Crowdfunding

As all three regular readers of this blog will know, I’ve been banging on about a writers’ co-op recently, this despite (or because of) the fact I don’t have two brass farthings to rub together. You’ll also know that I’ve written a novel called A GONZO NOIR (aka BAD FOR GOOD), the gist of which runneth thusly:

A GONZO NOIR is a story about how a struggling writer – one Declan Burke, coincidentally enough – is approached by a character called Karlsson, the latter being a character from an m/s Burke wrote some years ago, but which got shelved for its lack of commercial appeal, principally because Karlsson is a hospital porter and something of a psychopath, given to alleviating the pain of old patients in a terminal fashion. Trapped in the half-life limbo peopled by fictional characters who never see publication, Karlsson has a suggestion for Burke: make him a nicer psychopath to give the novel more commercial appeal, and give the story more oomph. To this end, Karlsson will collaborate on a rewrite of the m/s, which will involve him blowing up the hospital where he works. If Burke doesn’t play ball, then Karlsson will turn his psychopathic tendencies on Burke’s wife and baby daughter …

  The novel has been out under consideration with a number of publishers for some months now, and – ooh, the irony – it appears that, despite the largely positive reaction from commissioning editors, the story lacks for mass commercial appeal.
  As a result, I’m thinking strongly of self-publishing the novel, albeit self-publishing with a twist, as a kind of dry run for the co-op idea mentioned elsewhere on this blog. But before I get into the hard sell, let me offer you first a sample of the reactions I received when I sent the m/s to a number of writers in the hope of a blurb or two:

“A genuinely original take on noir, inventive and funny. Imagine, if you can, a cross between Flann O’Brien and Raymond Chandler.” – John Banville, Booker Prize-winning author of THE SEA

“A GONZO NOIR is unlike anything else you’ll read this year … Laugh-out-loud funny … This is writing at its dazzling, cleverest zenith. Think John Fowles, via Paul Auster and Rolling Stone … a feat of extraordinary alchemy.” – Ken Bruen, author of AMERICAN SKIN

“Burke has written a deep, lyrical and moving crime novel … an intoxicating and exciting novel of which the master himself, Flann O’Brien, would be proud.” – Adrian McKinty, author FIFTY GRAND

“Stop waiting for Godot – he’s here. Declan Burke takes the existential dilemma of characters writing themselves and turns it on its ear, and then some. He gives it body and soul … an Irish soul.” – Reed Farrel Coleman, three-time Shamus Award-winning author of EMPTY EVER AFTER

“A GONZO NOIR is shockingly original and completely entertaining. Post-modern crime fiction at its very best.” – John McFetridge, author of EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE

“A harrowing and yet hilarious examination of the gradual disintegration of a writer’s personality, as well as a damned fine noir novel … Burke has outdone himself this time; it’s a hell of a read.” – Scott Philips, author of THE ICE HARVEST

  Okay, now for the hard sell.
  Generally speaking, self-publishing involves a writer investing his or her own hard-earned money in having a book published, and then hoping that enough readers will buy the book to make it worth his or her while. Generally speaking, I tend to go about things backasswards, so I’m going to invert the conventional model and ask the readers to put their money where my mouth is. It’s a variation on crowdfunding, in which a reader pledges a certain amount of money to see the book published, and in return receives a copy of the book when it sees the light of day.
  Now, I know we’re living through straitened times, and that no one has money to toss around willy-nilly. That said, and these straitened times notwithstanding, people are still spending money and reading books; the crucial issue these days, at least in my own experience, is value for money.
  So: how much am I asking readers to pledge? Well, I reckon that €7 lies somewhere between what you might pay for a conventionally published book brand new off the shelves, and what you might pay for a decent book in a second-hand store. €7 converts (as of today’s conversion rates, February 17th) to roughly $9.60 (US), $10.60 (Aus), $10 (Can), and £6 (UK).
  The cost of self-publishing, going the print-on-demand (POD) route, is roughly €1,500. At €7 per book, that means I need to sell 214 books to break even, which seems to me eminently do-able. Of course, if everyone who pledges is receive a copy, then I need to build in post-and-packing at €5 per book, which bumps up the cost-per-book to me to €12. Were I to ask for a pledge of €12 per book, that would mean I’d need to sell 125 copies to break even. Sticking with the original pledge of €7, however, which I’d prefer to do, means I need to sell 367 books to break even, which still seems do-able to me. In total, then, I need to raise €2,570 to print, publish and post 367 books; if such can be done, I will receive a profit of almost exactly nil, but I’ll have a new book on the shelf, and – hopefully, if a tad optimistically – 367 readers given good value for their €7 investment.
  How to raise that amount in a fashion that is clear, transparent, and leaves the reader reassured that he or she isn’t going to be bilked for their €7? Well, there’s a site called Kickstarter, which offers a platform for the raising of capital for such projects as this. The basic idea is that I set up a project with a total amount that needs to be raised (€2,570). I let people know where and how they can pledge their €7, and hopefully 367 people buy into the idea. If the amount is raised within a specific time period (three months, say), then your pledge is accepted and transferred to my bank account, and shortly afterwards you receive your copy of A GONZO NOIR; if the total amount isn’t reached in a specified period, all pledges are cancelled and it costs nobody anything, except possibly yours truly’s pride. For more information on the Kickstarter project, clickety-click here.
  So there you have it. Any takers?

‘Good Writing’, Redux: Hooray For Hollywood

I posted last week about Darley Anderson’s comments on how ‘good writing’ was less important to his literary agency than character and plot when assessing writers, which prompted John McFetridge to weigh in thusly:

“Did we learn nothing from the movie business? Sure, the movies still make money, but almost every prize-winner, almost every movie for grown-ups, almost every movie with real people and not cartoons or cartoonish stories is based on a novel filled with ‘good writing’ because it turns out that’s the part you can’t ‘work with’, so you have to buy it somewhere else.”

  One of my paying gigs is as a movie reviewer, and one of the joys there is the fact that, when it comes to movies, no one – filmmakers, critics, the audience – discriminates against a movie on the basis of its genre. Two of the last three Best Picture Oscars, for example, have gone to crime flicks (The Departed and No Country for Old Men). If you check out the American Film Institute’s Top 10 Movies of All Time, the list runs like this:

Voted the number one movie was CITIZEN KANE, Orson Welles’ 1941 classic, which he directed, produced, wrote and starred in at the age of 25. The rest of the top ten, in order, are: CASABLANCA (#2), THE GODFATHER (#3), GONE WITH THE WIND (#4), LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (#5), THE WIZARD OF OZ (#6), THE GRADUATE (#7), ON THE WATERFRONT (#8), SCHINDLER’S LIST (#9) and SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (#10).

  Now, there’s a couple of things that need to be said about that list. (1) It’s an American list of movies. (2) Schindler’s List – wtf?
  That said, it’s interesting to note how many of the movies listed above are what the publishing industry would term ‘genre stories’ (this may have something to do with the fact that the movie industry, being rooted in the early 20th century, is a much more democratic form than the novel, which is 500 years old and rooted in a time when democracy was something the ancient Greeks once tried out). Crime, fantasy, romantic fiction, war – they deal in the kind of subject matter that does not routinely feature in the Booker Prize shortlist, say. Or, for that matter, win the Impac Prize, which is the most lucrative prize in publishing today.
  It’s also worth noting how many of the movies above are based on pre-existing stories – eight in total, seven novels and one play.
  I’m not going to make any grandiose claims on behalf of said novels (Darley Anderson would surely say that it was character and plot that made GONE WITH THE WIND or THE GODFATHER best-selling novels, for example, rather than ‘good writing’, and he would have a very good point). But, given that this is a crime fiction blog, let’s take The Godfather as a movie. It’s a superb character study, and has a great plot, drawing as it does on classical themes of guilt, loss, power (and its abuse) and redemption.
  Law Abiding Citizen is also a crime flick, a character study that trades in guilt, loss, power (and its abuse) and redemption. Released this year, it stars Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler, and is so bad it’s probably toxic.
  What makes The Godfather a great movie and Law Abiding Citizen a terrible one? The latter has nothing like the quality of actor the former has, which is a significant handicap, although it’s fair to say that the likes of Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall and James Caan have starred in some turkeys. Neither is it as simple as saying that Francis Ford Coppola is a genius director, because – as the last two decades have proved – he’s patently not. I’d argue that it’s the blend of Coppola (as director and screenwriter) and Mario Puzo (as screenwriter) and the great Gordon Willis (cinematography) and William Reynolds’ and Peter Zinner’s editing, and Warren Clymer’s art direction, among others, who contributed to what was (eventually) regarded as a masterpiece. The Godfather isn’t simply a triumph of story, character and theme. In cinematic terms, it has a beautiful grammar, an unerring instinct for when less is more, for the visual ‘mot juste’, for the barely perceptible nuance that fuses story, character and theme into an indivisible whole.
  It’s the equivalent, in other words, of ‘good writing’.
  This isn’t just an exercise in aesthetics. The Godfather was just another movie when it was first released, and as I understand it, Coppola was none too pleased to be asked to direct a ‘mob movie’. But three decades and more later, The Godfather is recognised as a classic, and – finally, here’s the point – continues to sell. I have no idea of what its figures are like, but I’d imagine that Law Abiding Citizen is highly unlikely to cover its costs by this time next year, let alone be still selling on DVD (or whatever the format is) in 30 years time.
  The notion that ‘good writing’ is an optional extra that grows more redundant by the year is given the lie by the likes of The Godfather. The beautiful (and latest) re-issue of the Raymond Chandler novels earlier this year is another case in point. ‘Good writing’ endures. It requires investment, of course, but it’s an investment that delivers and continues to deliver. The pursuit of short-term gain (quantity over quality) that got the world’s economy into the mess it’s in today is mirrored in the attitude that sees ‘good writing’ as an optional extra, or the least of a writer’s concerns.
  ‘Good writing’ isn’t enough in itself, of course. The number of very fine novels that have fallen out of print, never to see a shelf again, doesn’t bear thinking about. But this is where crime writing has – or should have – the edge over its counterparts in the publishing industry. Yes, plot and character are vital, and its relevance to its time and place means that the best crime novels will always be relevant. Take all that and put it in the hands of a writer who instinctively understands ‘good writing’ and you have a gold mine that may never tap out.
  There’s a mate of mine, you may have heard of him, called Adrian McKinty. I told him recently that he was too good a writer to ever make it really big, that he’s cursed by his obsession with ‘good writing’. But even if McKinty never sells on a par with James Patterson or John Grisham, he knows in his heart and can take it to his grave that he’s a good writer. That’s a thing that used to matter. It still does, and it always will.

EVERYBODY KNOWS That The Dice Are Loaded …

Get out the ceremonial kazoo, maestro: John McFetridge announces that the paperback of EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE will be published on November 1st, which is all kinds of good news. It’s not just that it’s a terrific novel, which it is; it’s that, for a quite a while, and for reasons bound up in the byzantine nature of the publishing industry, it looked as if the paperback of EKTIN wouldn’t appear at all. McFetridge is a mate of mine (although he wasn’t when I gave vent to the purple prose below), but leaving that aside, the paperback edition is a tiny triumph of quality over quantity, of good writing besting a system in which the dice are loaded in favour of the bottom line. Nice.
  John explains the tortuous route the paperback took to publication over at Do Some Damage; meanwhile, here’s the review I wrote, which somehow ended up, in its entirety, on the inside flap of the Canadian hardback edition of EKTIN, which was also nice. If you’re looking to pamper yourself this Christmas, reading-wise, then pick it up, and then DIRTY SWEET and SWAP too. Trust me, you’ll love yourself for it.

Easy now. This is the good stuff. Too much and you’ll be reeling around the room, blissed on the possibility of how good John McFetridge might get. Set in Toronto, EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE features an ensemble cast from both sides of the law, most of them spokes radiating out from Sharon, a single mother operating a low-level dope-growing operation. Gangs of Italians, South Asians and Angels, all grafting for a heavier slice of Toronto’s new prosperity; a Native American cop and his recently widowed partner investigating an apparent suicide while sitting on the powder keg of an internal affairs probe about to blow the Toronto force apart; Ray, a new face on the scene with an offer Sharon can’t refuse; Richard, the old flame now a power broker in the world of Canadian crime. A heady brew, but McFetridge marshals all the elements in a fluid tale that weaves in and out of various narratives in a manner akin to Elmore Leonard with a brevity of delivery that is almost an abbreviated form of style: “Canada, so generous to take them in. Thran’s father and his two uncles looking like scared refugees in front of the nice white people, got right to business doing exactly what they’d done back home. Pretty soon they had a nice little distribution network up and running. Didn’t even have to kill that many people.” But it’s the backdrop that makes the story. Toronto, much like the novel itself, is rapaciously ambitious, swaggeringly assured, brash beneath its cultured veneer, ripe with opportunity and tottering on the brink of anarchy. Sharon, her city and her country are in a state of flux that mirrors the ever-changing and ever-challenging nature of criminality itself, which the crime novel by necessity mirrors in its turn. For those with eyes to see, EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE is a shining moment of clarity in our confused grasping after some purpose in the chaos. – Declan Burke

Toronto’s Lone Ranger; and OLD DOGS For A Hard Road

It’s over a year now since I read John McFetridge’s SWAP, the third in his oeuvre after the Toronto-set DIRTY SWEET and EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE. As with the previous two, SWAP sent me into a sweaty, teeth-grinding frenzy of green-eyed monsterdom, which is always a good sign. Ken Bruen likes it too. Quoth Ken’s blurb:

“SWAP is a stunning leap forward from an already fine author. This is John channelling Elmore Leonard at the height of his game and with dialogue Tarantino would kill for. A plot that moves like Pulp Fiction but with a nice Canadian slant that keeps it fresh and different. John’s creation of the African-American characters is like Sallis at his finest. With a wicked sense of humour that is irresistible, SWAP moves Canadian mystery right to the top.”

  SWAP is published today in Canada, although it won’t hit U.S. stores – as LET IT RIDE – until next February. For what it’s worth, and bearing in mind that yon McFetridge is a good mate of mine, my advice is not to wait: SWAP is as good as the noir novel gets.
  Meanwhile, and while we’re on the subject of Ken Bruen, I’m hearing a rumour that yet another of his novels, the Busted Flush TOWER collaboration with Reed Farrel Coleman, has been optioned for the big screen, this time by the team behind the Tom Cruise flick Valkyrie. Can anyone confirm?
  Meanwhile meanwhile, and while we’re on the subject of Busted Flush and bigging-up good mates, here’s the cover for Donna Moore’s forthcoming OLD DOGS. Is it just me, or is that cover a work of art?

Buon Viaggio

Stick a fork in my skinny white ass, I’m done. At least, I’m done for the next 10 days – by the time you read this, I’ll be with the Lovely Ladies in Italy, first in Bergamo, for the wedding of the lovely Lisa Armstrong and the equally fragrant Michael Heraghty, and then on to Lake Garda (right) for a week. Looking forward to it …
  It’s been a busy, busy year – I really can’t remember the last time I looked forward to a holiday so much. The month I spent in the Greek islands with my brother, maybe, ‘researching’ a novel. If that novel is ever written, it’ll be about White Russians, and the entire soundtrack will be the Stones augmented by Don Henley’s The Boys of Summer.
  Met a guy on Ios during that holiday, actually. He walked into the Orange Bar barefoot, wearing a three-quarter length coat and white duck trousers, naked from the waist up, deeply tanned. He was rough around in the edges, and was the spitting image of El Dudalero Lebowski. That was the start of the White Russians, if memory serves. Anyway, I bought a round of Caucasians and brought one over to him. He just looked at me. I said, ‘Y’know, the Dude always drinks White Russians.’ He said, ‘Uh, sorry, man?’ I said, ‘The movie, The Big Lebowski.’ ‘Sorry, man, never heard of it.’ ‘You’ve never heard of The Big Lebowski?’ Cue shifty glance right and left. ‘I’ve, uh, had reason to be out of the jurisdiction for some time now.’
  Nice.
  So, Italy beckons, and I can’t wait – I’m already seeing long, lazy evenings on village squares drinking too much wine and eating too much pasta. Poor old Lily’s routine is about to be knocked into orbit … It’s the first proper holiday I’ve had in 12 months. The last holiday I had, I got stuck on a road-trip from Toronto to Baltimore with John McFetridge, who spent the entire nine days teaching me the rules of baseball. Or Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing. Or some such thing ... There were rules, I remember that much. So that doesn’t count.
  I’ve only ever been to Italy twice before, once to Sicily, the other time a stop-over at Milan airport, where I was accosted by an Alsatian sniffer dog and an armed cop, demanding to know what drugs I was smuggling, this at 8am, while I was hungover in the basement of hell, having flown out of Athens before dawn after a full night’s drinking with some Australian photographers. Sicily was nice, if I remember correctly … The best bit was when I discovered that ‘the bill’ in Italian is ‘il cunto’. I was storming into restaurants to pay for strangers’ meals after I heard that …
  Anyway, I’ll see you all back here some time near the end of the month. In the meantime, here’s Don Henley’s The Boys of Summer. Roll it there, Collette ...

A GONZO NOIR: One Step Closer To Garnering Nappy Vouchers

Okay, so you’ve probably had it up to your proverbials with A GONZO NOIR blurbs this week, but I really couldn’t resist this one. All three regular readers will be familiar with moniker of ‘Benny Blanco’, it being CAP’s nom-de-plume for Benjamin Black, the crime-writing alter-ego / open pseudonym of John Banville (right). As it happens, and as I only discovered in the wake of interviewing John Banville a couple of weeks ago, the protagonist of Banville’s first novel, NIGHTSPAWN, is called Ben White. So I guess the joke has been on me all along …
  Anyway, I took the liberty of getting in touch with John Banville to see if he’d take a squint at A GONZO NOIR, with a view to perhaps providing a line or two that might nudge the book in the direction of garnering some nappy vouchers. To my surprise, he said he’d take a look at it, and he came back yesterday with this:

“A genuinely original take on noir, inventive and funny. Imagine, if you can, a cross between Flann O’Brien and Raymond Chandler.” – John Banville, Booker Prize-winning author of THE SEA

  Which is very, very nice indeed. Actually, I’m still a bit dizzy … But then, it’s been a very-nice-indeed kinda week, given the feedback I’ve had on the book (scroll down for verdicts from Adrian McKinty, Reed Farrel Coleman, John McFetridge and Ken Bruen), and especially as I’ve never been as unsure of a book as I am with A GONZO NOIR.
  I’ve said it before but it bears repeating – the extravagant generosity of the crime writing and reading community is a joy to behold. God bless you, every one …

A GONZO NOIR: Reed All About It, Etc.

I’ve mentioned the Holden Caulfield impulse before on these pages, the Holden Caulfield impulse being the one where Holden says that sometimes when you finish a book you’d like to be able to call up the author and tell him what a great book it was. Thanks to the interweb, I’ve been able to act on that impulse a couple of times over the last few years. One of those times was shortly after I read Reed Farrel Coleman’s (right) THE JAMES DEANS, which I read in one sitting out on a balcony on a rainy day in Croatia while my beloved went shopping: just me, coffee, cigarettes and Moe Prager. A damn fine day it was too, rain or no rain. Anyway, I dropped Reed Farrel Coleman a line to tell him how brilliant I thought the book was, and one thing led to another, and he ended up writing me a very generous blurb for THE BIG O. Which was nice.
  What was nicer was, at last year’s Bouchercon in Baltimore, I was at the bar with John McFetridge when I spotted Reed Coleman. “Hold on,” says I, “there’s Reed Coleman. I need to buy that man a drink.” Except Reed Farrel Coleman went, “No, man – I’m buying you a drink.”
  As Holden Caulfield might say, albeit without the sarcasm, the man’s a goddamn prince.
  All of which is a long-winded preamble to saying that Reed Farrel Coleman has been kind enough to blurb A GONZO NOIR. To wit:

“Stop waiting for Godot – he’s here. Declan Burke takes the existential dilemma of characters writing themselves and turns it on its ear and then some. He gives it body and soul … an Irish soul. If you want to think while you’re being entertained, read this book.” – Reed Farrel Coleman, two-time Shamus Award-winning author of EMPTY EVER AFTER

  Like I say, the man’s a gent …
  In one of those lovely twists of fate the universe offers up once in a while, the aforementioned John ‘Fetch’ McFetridge (right) chipped in with his two cents early the following morning. As with Adrian McKinty, the man’s a mate, a good bloke and a terrific writer, and not necessarily in that order. Anyway, quoth John:

“In this era of formulaic, pre-fab, test-marketed, focus-grouped, pre-packaged, no-risk sequels, remakes and the same-old same-old all over again, A GONZO NOIR is shockingly original and completely entertaining. Post-modern crime fiction at its very best.” – John McFetridge, author of EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE

  Two things I’m liking about the reactions to A GONZO NOIR. Well, three, given that I’m chuffed people seem to like it, obviously. But one thing I do like is how quickly the reactions are coming back, given that the manuscripts only went out about 10 days ago; and another thing is that the people who’ve been so generous already, namely Ken Bruen and Adrian McKinty, and now Reed Farrel Coleman and John McFetridge, are writers who don’t stand to benefit anything by doing so. I’ve raised the spectre of log-rolling already, but I’m only flattering myself when I do that – these guys have nothing to gain by lending me a hand, because a bottom-feeder like me is no position to return the log-roll favour. I can write about them on Crime Always Pays, of course, but that amounts to about three molecules of publicity oxygen …
  Anyway, you can analyse these things too closely. The bottom line is that terrific writers seem to like the book, and that they’re prepared to say so. All hopes of publication and / or earning nappy vouchers aside, that kind of reaction is priceless …

Only In It For The Money

The Spinetingler Awards are with us again, people, and all very democratic it is too – if you can click a mouse, you can vote. The good news is that neither yours truly nor THE BIG O have been nominated, although the bad news is that Crime Always Pays has been, in the ‘Special Services to the Industry’ category.
  A couple of things about that. (1) Much as I appreciate the nod, and at the risk of sounding ungracious, I’m not doing the little I do for the industry, and I suspect that very few bloggers and / or webnauts are either. If I win, I’ll have to hand the gong back. (2) Of which happening there being very little chance, given that (a) there’s no actual gong and (b) the other nominees include Ruth and Jon Jordan, J. Kingston Pierce, Barbara Franchi, and the man with the biggest brain in the universe, Peter Rozovsky (pictured, top right). (3) In my not-so-humble opinion, and off the top of my head, I can think of Sarah Weinman, Karen Meek, Maxine Clarke and the Spinetingler crew themselves as more deserving nominees than your humble host (Glenn Harper, Karen Chisholm and Ali Karim are nominated in the ‘Review’ category), mainly because, as far as I can make out, they all do it as a labour of love, whereas I’m only in it for the money. (4) Go Rozovsky!
  Of the other categories, I’ll be keeping a close eye on the ‘Rising Star’, which pits Allan Guthrie against his old nemesis Ray Banks. Anyone else willing to pay to see those two beasts going at it in a cage-fight? And ‘New Voice’ should be interesting too, given that John McFetridge, Declan Hughes and Brian McGilloway are all jostling for position as you read. Fine writers and good blokes to a man, although, on the basis that I’ve spent 10 days sharing bathroom space with the man, and didn’t want to kill him afterwards, McFetridge gets my nod.
  To vote, clickety-click here …

Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better

Some interesting news via John Connolly’s blog, folks, where he’s musing on a novel he’s currently writing: “At the same time, having finished the fairly minor edits for THE LOVERS, I’ve returned to an odd book that I’ve been humming and hawing over for quite some time … That urge to experiment, to try new things that may fail, is one that’s becoming increasingly difficult to indulge as time goes on.” ‘An odd book’? If we’re into territory even remotely approaching the ‘experiment’ of JC’s meisterwerk THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS, I’ll be a very happy man indeed. As the boy Beckett may never have actually said, ‘Try again, fail again, fail better.’
  Meanwhile, I heard yesterday that John McFetridge’s SWAP will be coming to an American shelf near you in early 2010, and possibly late this year in a Canadian edition, which is superb news. I read SWAP last year in m/s, and even factoring in the provisio that El Fetch is a buddy of mine, it’s still a terrific read, and his best yet in my not-very-humble opinion. The vid below is the proposed trailer: roll it there, Collette …

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

There’s been a lot of negativity and pessimism around these here parts lately – I blame John McFetridge, myself – but here’s a piece from Publishers Weekly on U.S. sales from 2008 that kind of puts all the talk of doom and gloom into perspective, the gist of it running thusly:

Despite panic among many publishers and booksellers about the state of the business, figures compiled by Nielsen BookScan show that unit sales fell only 0.2% in 2008, to 756.1 million.

  Now, I know that the business side of the industry is not my forte, and that there are tough times to come over the next few years, but a drop of 0.2% is hardly the End of Times, is it? Oh, and by the way – adult fiction actually grew in 2008, by 0.4%. Three cheers, two stools and a lusty huzzah!
  Meanwhile, those of you thinking about what kind of novel to write next might want to consider the fact that Juvenile sales were the biggest mover, by a long chalk, up 6.2%. Maybe I should start paying more attention to Ms Witch …

Git Along, Lil’ Dogie: Lawks, ’Tis The Friday Round-Up

It’s Friday, so we’ll have an end-of-week round-up thingy. Any objections? No? Then read on …
  I met the radiant Arlene Hunt (right) for a cwaffee during the week, to have a chat about this project here, during which Arlene came up with an idea for a terrific chapter. During the course of the chat, we talked about ‘Kennedy’ moments in Irish crime, such as the murder of investigative reporter Veronica Guerin in 1996, and the murder of Lord Mountbatten in 1979.
  Another of those moments that had seismic consequences for Ireland, the Omagh bombing, gets the Ruth Dudley-Edwards treatment in AFTERMATH, due this April from Harvill Secker. To wit:

The Omagh bomb was the worst massacre in Northern Ireland’s modern history - yet from it came a most extraordinary tale of human resilience, as families of murdered people channelled their grief into action. As the bombers congratulated themselves on escaping justice, the families determined on a civil case against them and their organisation. No one had ever done this before: many are likely to do it in the future. It was a very domestic atrocity. In Omagh, on Saturday, 15 August, 1998, a 500lb bomb placed by the Real IRA, murdered twenty-nine shoppers - five men, fourteen women and nine children, of whom two were Spanish and one English: the dead included Protestants, Catholics and a Mormon. Although the police believed they knew the identities of the killers, there was insufficient evidence to bring charges. Taking as their motto ‘For evil to triumph, all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing’, families of ten of the dead decided to go after these men through the civil courts, where the burden of proof is lower. These were ordinary people who knew little of the world - they included a factory worker, a mechanic and a cleaner; they had no money, no lawyers, and there was no legal precedent for such an action. This is the story of how - with the help of a small group of London sympathisers that included a viscount and two ex-terrorists - these Omagh families surmounted all the obstacles to launch a civil case against RIRA and five named individuals, developed with reference to recent European legislation by one of the world’s leading human rights lawyers. Along the way the families became formidable campaigners who won the backing of Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush as well as of Bob Geldof and Bono. How these relatives turned themselves into the scourge of RIRA is not just an astonishing story in itself. It is also a universal story of David challenging Goliath, as well as an inspiration to ordinary people anywhere devastated by terrorism. RIRA today: ETA tomorrow: the Mafia, perhaps, the day after.

  If there’s any justice, it’ll be a smash best-seller.
  Meanwhile, the boys from Norn Iron are coming on strong. Here’s Stuart Neville on ‘How I got Published’, while Sam Millar (right) has just declared himself open for business over at his shiny new interweb lair, MillarCrime. Drop on over and tell him a joke.
  Elsewhere, a Gallic-shaped birdie tells me that Tana French is working away on her third novel, which currently rejoices in the working title FAITHFUL PLACE, and which will continue the trend of IN THE WOODS and THE LIKENESS in that it features a character from the latter novel as its main protagonist. “Frank Mackey, Cassie Maddox’s old boss from THE LIKENESS, is the narrator this time,” says Tana. “He’s spent his whole adult life thinking that his first love Rosie dumped him and ran off to England, and he hasn’t spoken to his family since that night. Then Rosie’s suitcase shows up, hidden in the wall of a house on their old road ...”
  If we’re all very good, Tana will have it ready for us by the end of the year. Unfortunately, I’m not being at all good over at John McFetridge’s place, although I am becoming cooler by the day, and through no great effort of my own. Fetch’s metafiction Baltimore Bouchercon crime spree continues apace … while Peter Rozovsky, in a Tana French-like twist, has leaped from a minor character in McFetridge’s story to become the author of a parallel tale of murder and mayhem in ‘The Baltimore Drive-By’. I can’t keep up …
  Finally, can it be true that J.D. Salinger (right) has turned 90?