The Full Monto

I received an interesting email yesterday, the gist of which ran like this:

“I’m a PhD student at Queen’s University Belfast, researching prostitution in modern Irish literature. I’m hoping to write a chapter of my thesis on crime fiction, and I was wondering if you’d be able to give me any reading suggestions for Irish crime fiction books with prostitutes in them?”

  The student had already identified Stuart Neville’s STOLEN SOULS and Arlene Hunt’s VICIOUS CIRCLE, along with Liam O’Flaherty’s THE INFORMER and THE ASSASSIN for background. After taking a good long look at the Irish crime fiction shelves, about all I was able to add to the list was Niamh O’Connor’s TAKEN, which – if memory serves – features an escort model.
  That set me wondering as to why prostitution hasn’t featured more frequently in Irish crime writing. A hangover from an unusually puritanical Catholicism? I really don’t know. Anyway, if anyone out there has any reading suggestions for the PhD student, I’d be very grateful if you’d send them on, either via the comment box below or by email. Thanks in advance, folks.

Fade To Black

Born in New York, Stephan Talty’s roots extend all the way across the Atlantic to County Clare, from which fabulously exotic setting his parents hail. What has that to do with his debut novel, BLACK IRISH (Headline)? Erm, nowt. To wit:

Harvard-educated Detective Absalom ‘Abbie’ Kearney has returned to ‘The County’ - an Irish enclave in Buffalo, NY - to take care of her ageing father, legendary former cop John Kearney. In one of America’s most deprived and dilapidated cities, tensions run high and Abbie’s day job is never easy. But when it becomes apparent that a relentless and merciless killer has set to work, it’s about to get a lot harder. Faced with scenes of inconceivable violence, Abbie’s investigation takes her to the heart of this fiercely closed community. And the darkness she finds there will affect her life in ways she could never have imagined ...

  Someday soon I’m going to write a book on Irish-American crime writers, incorporating Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly, James Lee Burke, George V. Higgins, Horace McCoy, et al. And now Stephan Talty. The starting point, of course, will be Raymond Chandler’s sojourn in Waterford. Or perhaps Liam O’Flaherty’s wanderings in the alleys of San Francisco? Hmmmm …

O Danny Boy Woodrell

Senator Eoghan Harris made an impassioned pitch in last weekend’s Sunday Independent for Daniel Woodrell to be considered an Irish writer - “or at least an Irish reader.” To wit:

Doyle Redmond, the chief character in GIVE US A KISS, is an educated ‘hillbilly’ (an intimate term like ‘Paddy’ which Ozarkers resent on the lips of outsiders) who deliberately damps down his vocabulary when at home. And while Doyle is a novelist he’s also someone the Kansas police want to talk to.
  But when Doyle holes up in a shack in the Ozarks he lovingly lays out “the books I never left behind, and made any crap hole I landed in home to me”. Look at the list and you will see why Woodrell should be accorded an honorary status as an Irish writer -- or at least an Irish reader.
  “There were a couple of Elizabeth Bowen novels, a quartet by Edward Lewis Wallant, one volume of Pierce Egan’s Boxiana, The Williamsburg Trilogy by Daniel Fuchs, Carson McCullers’s oeuvre, a stack of Twain, a batch of Erskine Caldwell’s thin li’l wonders, some Liam O’Flaherty and John McGahern and Grace Paley and Faulkner, all of Chandler, and a copy of Jim Harrison’s A Good Day to Die.”

  Woodrell is not only the senator’s favourite crime novelist, he’s his favourite novelist, full stop.
  That, it’s fair to say, is not something I might have expected to hear from an Irish senator in my lifetime. For the rest of the piece, clickety-click here.
  Senator Harris is in for a treat this September, because the great Daniel Woodrell will be appearing at the Mountains to Sea Literary Festival in Dun Laoghaire, on Sunday September 9th at 4.30pm.
  I’m delighted to say that your humble host will be reading alongside Daniel Woodrell - and that, it’s fair to say, is not something I might have expected to hear from myself in my lifetime. Arts journalist and broadcaster Sinead Gleeson will be playing the genial host, and already it’s shaping up to be one of the highlights of my year. For more information, and booking, etc., clickety-click here.
  Finally, and while we’re on the subject of the Mountains to Sea Festival, I’ll be hosting a crime writing workshop on Saturday, September 8th, during which I will “guide participants through the principles of good crime writing and will talk about the particular nuances of this popular form and explore the craft of the genre, outlining the elements that comprise a compelling novel.”
  Of course, I could just tell you now to read Daniel Woodrell’s entire canon and achieve pretty much the same result. But where’s the fun in that?

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

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

Editor’s Note: I received a rather interesting review of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL by John J. Gaynard during the week; when I investigated further, I discovered that John J. Gaynard is himself the author of what sounds like a rather fascinating novel. Now read on …

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
The Bible. Although I’d put more effort into improving on the lazy Sunday draft that gets the whole thing off to the sexist, incestuous, start and I’d make sure that it’s, Abel, the eater of sacrificial meat and not Cain, the vegetarian brother, who gets murdered. The book’s greatest accomplishment, apart from the spinoffs, is that you’ve got this schizophrenic Stalin-like figure, sending down floods of hate, revenge, betrayal and plagues of locusts, whenever it suits him, while the head-scratchers in the Gulag he’s created can’t come up with the right question: “Did we invent him or did he invent us?” Every good cop who turns up, in the shape of a prophet, gets sold out by his own side. But the main reason this is the book I would have liked to write is the sales and the number of boondoogles you’d get invited to. The Bible study industry is still bigger than the James Joyce or Shakespeare industries.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Gulley Jimson, the painter, in the Anglo-Irish writer Joyce Cary’s 1940s trilogy: HERSELF SURPRISED, TO BE A PILGRIM and, in what I think is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, THE HORSE’S MOUTH. At the beginning of THE HORSE’S MOUTH, Gulley Jimson has just got out of jail. Collectors would pay thousands for any painting he could produce. But Jimson couldn’t give a damn about them, he paints for himself, not for anybody else, the problem is he hasn’t got a penny to buy brushes, paint or a palette. He borrows or scams money from any old acquaintance who will still talk to him, similar to a character in a Ken Bruen novel, and tries to get back some of the paintings he gave away before he went broke. His new passion is for painting on people’s walls. I suppose you could call him the original tagger. He destroys himself, but he never has a minute of guilt or regret. His whole life is either spent getting his hands on a brush and paints, or in painting itself and nearly getting killed by the people who think he’s desecrated their houses. It’s one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read. At the end, when he’s on his deathbed, a nun criticizes him for laughing instead of praying and he tells her that they’re the same thing.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Suzanne Tyrpak, the author of DATING MY VIBRATOR. DATING MY VIBRATOR is a small book of hilarious short stories about a lady who went through a messy divorce, hit the online dating sites and then discovered, as do many innocent young divorcees, that all men, not only the ex-husband, are congenital liars. The book’s about the mental and physical deficiencies of the sex-hungry slobs the hero meets, and you couldn’t call any of the descriptions complimentary. After the book came out, one of the slobs recognized himself in one of the stories, and since then he’s been giving Suzanne really bad reviews on Amazon, and any other website he can come across. There’s a big phenomenon in France of women becoming call girls after they’ve had some experience on online dating sites. They say they might as well get paid for doing what they have to do anyway

Most satisfying writing moment?
There have been many of them, ranging from when I got a story published in the old London Evening News, through when I got my first satirical article published by Le Monde, or when a French translation of Allen Ginsberg’s meeting with Ezra Pound was published. In those days I was using a nom de plume. The latest most satisfactory moment is when I saw the Kirkus Review of THE IMITATION OF PATSY BURKE. Maybe once in a lifetime you get a reviewer who really understands what you were trying to write: “A rich, darkly comic send-up of the art world and the megalomaniacal souls that populate it.” The only quibble I might have with that review is that it might not prepare readers for the novel’s really dark side.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Of all time, I would say THE INFORMER by Liam O’Flaherty. The best one I’ve read over the past few years is Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE, published in the States as THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST. I like a novel that contains an element of psychopathy and some good fight scenes. The fight, or maybe I should say massacre scene, towards the end of THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST is second to none.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Every day I realize that there are a hell of a lot of Irish crime novels I still haven’t read. Tana French’s IN THE WOODS would make a great movie, but you’d have to make sure that Cecilia Ahern wasn’t taken on to write the script.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing, apart from French women writers who’ve fallen out of love with you making you a character in their books, is that it’s easy to become isolated from the rest of humanity. To avoid that I get up very early, every morning in Paris and I spend a couple of hours doing a café crawl, meeting up with friends like taxi drivers, plumbers, illegal African immigrants working on the building sites, and transsexual night club bouncers or heterosexual hostesses, who clock off at six o’clock in the morning and who like to sit around and talk shop in the cafés for a couple of hours before they head home for bed. One of the transsexual bouncers used to run the newspaper shop in the European Commission building in Luxemburg and, s/he tells me, the stuff that went on there was weirder than any club in the whole of the European Union. Once the office workers come out, at about eight-thirty, I head back to my own work. One of my favorite songs is Jacques Dutronc’s, “It’s 5 a.m. Paris Awakes”. It’s about a young man walking down from Pigalle, as it used to be, after a night in the clubs. The best thing is raising your head after ten or eleven hours of work and realizing that you’ve been so captivated by what you’re doing that you’ve lived life to the full. Then you can sit down to three or four hours of reading before you go contentedly to bed.

The pitch for your next book is …?
It’s going to be about a testosterone-fuelled Irish Guard, Timothy O’Mahony, who first came to life in my first novel, ANOTHER LIFE. O’Mahony is the son of a French woman and an Irish father, from Charlestown. After a scandalous liaison with a Northern Irish woman politician, he was demoted from a senior position in Dublin and exiled to the Garda station in Bangor, Erris. He’s now put in charge of investigating the murder of a young African girl, whose body washed up on the shoreline of County Mayo. The story will take O’Mahony into that part of French life in which presidential candidates, policemen, prostitutes and jaded middle-class political groupies engage in group sex, freemasonry, corruption and conversations about Ireland’s refusal to extradite people strongly suspected of killing beautiful French women. Any resemblance to what is going on at the moment in Ireland, France, or what recently happened in New York, will be purely fortuitous. I’m still deciding to what extent O’Mahony will be allowed to participate in the group sex.

Who are you reading right now?
I just finished reading the Australian crime writer Peter Temple’s THE BROKEN SHORE. It’s the prototypical hard-bitten crime novel, with a lot of guilt about how much unspoken homosexuality underlies the Australian need for mateship. The dialogue reminded me of Allan Guthrie’s writing. I just started on William Boyd’s ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS, because I’ve always liked the comic element of Boyd’s novels and then I’ll probably read the recent Goncourt Prize winner, THE FRENCH ART OF WAR, even though, the other day, when I asked a guy in a train sitting with the book in front of him and looking out the window, how he was enjoying it he told me he hadn’t been able to get past the first two pages …

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I’d tell her to go to hell. If she wouldn’t take that for an answer, I would opt for writing, write her out of her own story and then go back to reading.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Whatever it takes! At times, the story needs sex, booze, brawling and schizophrenia, and at other times it needs some pathos.

John J Gaynard’s THE IMITATION OF PATSY BURKE is published by Createspace.

Stop, You’re Killing Me

The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman had a nice piece over on the Guardian Book Blog today (Thursday, 3rd), in which he waxed lyrical about the comic crime novel. The gist runneth thusly:

“ … humour in crime fiction is nowadays a rare bird. I was struck by something my friend, thriller writer John Connolly – 7m sales and counting – said at a writing workshop, that comic crime fiction, with rare exceptions, is never going to sell and will forever be frozen out of the major prizes. The Last Laugh Award that my latest book – The Day of the Jack Russell – has picked up is a fantastic honour, but to put it in perspective, it was announced at Bristol’s international convention on crime fiction at the same time as those other biggies, the e-Dunnit Award for best ebook first published in the UK and The Sounds of Crime Award for best abridged and unabridged audiobooks. All three were vastly overshadowed by the concurrent announcement of this year’s Crime Writers’ Association Dagger awards shortlist, which is not noticeably troubled by anything likely to put a smile on your face. John Connolly has a point …
  “Which means, bizarrely, that if you want to find something new and challenging, comic crime fiction is now the place to go. British authors like Robert Lewis, Charlie Williams, Malcolm Pryce, Chris Ewan, Declan Burke and Len Tyler are at the vanguard of a new wave of young writers kicking against the clichés and producing ambitious, challenging, genre-bending works. They may not yet be hogging the bestseller lists but at least they’re adding some wit and balls to a moribund genre. What they’d all probably say, if I could be bothered asking them, is that people who read their books love them, it’s getting them to pick them up in the first place that is the difficulty.”

  Now, yours truly is a native-born and horny-handed son of the soil of Eireann, as some of you know and some of you even care. But I’m more than willing to overlook the fact that I’m now - according to Bateman, at least - a subject of Queen Elizabeth II, bless her cotton socks, on the basis that he reckons I’m (a) comic, (b) challenging, (c) loved and (d) young. Said last - young! - being by far the most important attribute, obviously. Take that, mid-life crisis!
  Bateman, by the way, will be appearing at the Gutter Bookshop next Wednesday, June 9th, where he’ll be waffling at some length about the paperback release of the award-winning THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL. Click on the pic top right for all the details …
  Elsewhere, Joe Long, a good friend of this blog, and of Irish crime writing in general, forwards me on an article from the Irish Echo celebrating the rise and rise of Irish crime writing. Quoth Joe:

“John Connolly is the pied piper,” said Joe Long, a graduate student at New York University. Ten years ago, he met Connolly at a reading in New York and they became firm friends. Soon, Long, who has lived all of his 58 years in Manhattan, was hooked on Irish crime fiction. “There’re all great,” he said. “It’s not just good crime writing; it’s good Irish writing.”

  For more, clickety-click here. But be warned, it mentions me a bit …
  Actually, I’m having a pretty good week, I have to say. I got a nice email from someone running an on-line book club asking if I’d be interested in BAD FOR GOOD being their July pick, this despite the fact that BAD FOR GOOD has yet to be published. I don’t mind telling you, I was pretty flattered …
  Speaking of which: we (aka Team Laughably Impossible Dream, aka the group of crack optimists doing their damnedest to inflict the demented wibblings of yours truly on an unsuspecting public) got a little nibble on said BAD FOR GOOD this week, and from a rather impressive source. Protocol demands that I gloss over the details; suffice to say that the house publishes two of the finest crime writers of all time. Again, I’m pretty flattered. And not only that, but it transpires that there are two other houses displaying ‘serious’ interest. All of which amounts to a hill of beans, of course, but hey - only one of those beans needs to be magic, right?
  On top of all that, it looks like it’s going to be a sunny Bank Holiday, for once. I’m off to the Flat Lake Festival in Monaghan on Saturday June 6th, there to hook up - all going well and Sat Nav permitting - with Brian McGilloway and Ed O’Loughlin, the idea being to (a) promote the bejasus out of two of the finest contemporary Irish authors, (b) chat about THE INFORMER and THE ASSASSIN, the ur-noir novels of Liam O’Flaherty and (c) wonder aloud to no great practical purpose about whether contemporary Irish novels are engaging with the political realities of Ireland today in the way O’Flaherty rather bravely engaged with his. If you’re in the general vicinity of Monaghan, we’ll be yakking it up in the Butty Barn at 2.45pm: do drop by for a heckle or two.
  For the full Flat Lake Festival line-up - which includes Anne Enright, Alexei Sayle, The Brad Pitt Light Orchestra, Eoin McNamee, Dermot Healy, Shane McGowan, Eugene McCabe, greasy-pig wrassling and generalised debauchery - clickety-click here …

The Deceptively Simple Art Of Murder

There’s been a lot of talk recently about whether Irish writers are engaging with modern Ireland, a conversation begun by Julian Gough and continued in the Irish Times recently by Eileen Battersby and Joseph O’Connor. Despite the fact that most Irish crime writers tend to be as contemporary in terms of storyline and setting as the business of publishing will allow, said writers are noticeably absent from the conversation. Caroline Walsh, the Literary Editor at the Irish Times, was good enough to suggest that I write a piece rectifying that state of affairs, and the piece is published today, with the opening following below.
  I honestly think there’s something important at stake here. It’s not simply an issue of relevance in terms of writing about contemporary subject matter, as I say in the piece; it’s about the relevance of literature itself, and the function of a body of literature in relation to the culture it springs from. At the risk of sounding a complete plank in quoting myself, I have this to say: “Making a distinction between crime and literary fiction in Ireland today is … redundant, unless it’s to suggest that contemporary Irish crime authors are producing a canon of work that’s equally important as that of their literary counterparts.” To paraphrase Raymond Chandler from The Simple Art of Murder, crime writers are taking the Irish novel out of the drawing room and dropping it in the alley, where it belongs.
  Have on, James, and spare not the horses …

We always take great pride in our writers – except for our crime writers, who, despite being feted abroad, get little recognition here. Strange, given that they seem to be the ones tackling the burning issues, writes DECLAN BURKE

THE ASSASSINATION in 1986 of the Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme sent shockwaves through Sweden in particular and Scandinavia in general. One consequence was the emergence of an indigenous crime fiction, a phenomenon taken very seriously by cultural commentators in Sweden and Norway. Today, writers such as Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbø are household names across the world.
  The then Irish minister for justice, Kevin O’Higgins, was assassinated on his way to Mass in July, 1927. In 1928, Liam O’Flaherty published The Assassin, a political thriller set in Dublin about the murder of a prominent politician. Its staccato rhythms, spare style and bleak tone, the psychological study of a disturbed criminal mind, was practically a blueprint for the hard-boiled crime writing produced in the following years by American writers Dashiell Hammett and James M Cain, yet Ireland has had to wait until the past decade for a comparable outpouring of crime writing ...

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

It’s A Long Way From Licking Goobers Off The Cobbles

You hear a lot of guff these days from Ireland’s literati about Irish literature’s failure to produce the Great Celtic Tiger Novel. ‘Where, oh where, is the Great Celtic Tiger Novel?’ is the general gist of it, followed by, ‘Why, oh why?’ and ‘Oh when, oh when?’. Well, a little birdie tells me that the wait is almost over. Once Amadán O’Lungamhain concludes IT’S A LONG WAY FROM LICKING GOOBERS OFF THE COBBLES, his five-volume epic ring cycle on the eradication of TB, he’s setting his sights on the Celtic Tiger years. A HILL OF MAGIC BEANS should be arriving on shelf near you by 2051 at the very latest.
  At the risk of sounding a tad more obtuse than usual, I really don’t get this obsession with the Great Celtic Tiger Novel. Yes, I understand that Ireland is a post-colonial country that has yet to shuck off its inferiority complex, and that a reluctance to engage, as Brian Cowen might say, with ‘we are where we are’ is a symptom of that. And yes, I understand that writing novels about the past offers the opportunity of rewriting the past, and thus making the official version of our tawdry history that bit more palatable. And I understand too, if the post-boom years are any marker, that Ireland is one of the very few modern nations for which the past is not another country where they do things differently; Ireland, as the newspaper headlines on any given day will tell us, is a country that bears an eerie similarity to the psychological landscape of Flann O’Brien’s THE THIRD POLICEMAN, in which past, present and future are locked into a hellish cycle of eternal return. If our politicians, financiers, bishops and electorate are all doomed to repeat their mistakes over and over again, never truly escaping tragedy into farce, then why should our novelists be any different?
  Maybe it’s the case – and bear in mind that some days I’m more wilfully obtuse than others – that I’m simply too callow or uneducated to appreciate the subtle nuances of a body of literature that glories in its inability to come to terms with the present, or at least to try. But it seems to me that any self-respecting novel should be more interested in raising pertinent questions than providing belated answers, in wrestling with current dilemmas than offering quasi-philosophical interpretations of historical events. The point of any art, surely, is to reflect and / or investigate the culture from which it springs. That’s not as easy as it sounds, of course, especially when it comes to the novel. A good book can take an author years to write, so that he or she finds that the zeitgeist has long sailed by time the book lands on a shelf. It’s also true that a crucial moment in a nation’s development can take many years for all the sediment to sift down, so that an author can see it clearly enough for what it really was. By which time, unfortunately, the novel is no longer relevant as a tool to aid our understanding of ourselves, which is the fundamental point of art.
  You wouldn’t know it if you only listened to the Irish literati, but there is a body of writers engaging with modern Ireland. Only time will tell if they are entitled to call themselves artists, but right now they are asking hard questions of our society, our mores, challenging our ethical stances. This is the kind of thing that good crime fiction does as a matter of course, and that a number of Irish crime writers are doing on a regular basis. Brian McGilloway, Ken Bruen, Tana French, Declan Hughes, Gene Kerrigan, Alan Glynn, Stuart Neville – these are some of the writers who do not allow themselves the luxury of elapsed decades before confronting the issues that are relevant to a country bedevilled by corruption at virtually every strata of society. Yes, yes, I know I cut a pathetic figure bleating on yet again about the relevance of Irish crime fiction, but you’d need to be a far more obtuse figure than I not to appreciate the fact that there is a phenomenon at play here; and more, that such writers – like Liam O’Flaherty publishing THE ASSASSIN in 1928, or Colin Bateman publishing DIVORCING JACK in 1995 – deserve credit for their courage in grappling with crucial issues when they are still live, messy and important.
  All of which protracted preamble leads me to the ever-radiant Arlene Hunt, who appeared on TV3 last Thursday morning chatting about her new tome, BLOOD MONEY. I can’t say too much about the novel just yet, as I won’t get to start reading it for another day or two, but I do know that the story dips a toe into the murky waters of organ tourism, aka the black market in organ transplants, and subsequently tip-toes through an ethical minefield. Now, I have no idea of how prevalent organ tourism is here in Ireland, although I’ve no reason to believe it’s not as common-place here as it is anywhere else; nor do I know how qualified or otherwise Arlene Hunt is to write about the topic. I do know that Arlene Hunt is a terrific story-teller, though, and that I’m looking forward to reading a topical novel about contemporary Ireland.
  Topical novels about contemporary Ireland, eh? When literary Ireland finally gets around to pulling its head out of its ass, and stops whining about how the Arts Council trough is no longer as full as it used to be, and realises that it’s not entitled to consider itself an heir to Joyce, Beckett, Shaw, O’Casey, et al simply because there’s a harp on its passport, it might want to consider the following question: Is a topical novel about modern Ireland once in a blue moon really too much to ask?

The Gospel According To Genre

There was a good piece in Publishers Weekly titled ‘Breaking the Wall’, in which a variety of crime writers discuss what Michael Connelly describes as the ‘membrane’ (as opposed to ‘wall’) between genre and literary fiction. For my money, Tana French (right) nails it to the wall:

“When you’re working to make a sentence as perfect as it can be,” says French, “or to make a character real and vivid and three-dimensional, how and whether you do that isn’t dependent on where the book will be shelved.”

  Well said, that woman. Mind you, Tana is one of those writers for whom style appears to be every bit as important as plot or character. Could it be a coincidence that IN THE WOODS and THE LIKENESS are award-winning best-sellers? Erm, probably not …
  It’s also true that Ireland has its fair share of ‘literary crime fiction’: John Banville’s THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE and THE UNTOUCHABLE, Flann O’Brien’s THE THIRD POLICEMAN, Pat McCabe’s THE BUTCHER BOY, Eoin McNamee’s RESURRECTION MAN (and others), Brian Moore’s THE COLOUR OF BLOOD (and others), Liam O’Flaherty’s THE INFORMER and THE ASSASSIN, David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, Kevin Power’s BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, Gerard Donovan’s JULIUS WINSOME, Edna O’Brien’s IN THE FOREST (and others) … It’s a long and noble tradition.
  Okay, your turn. Your favourite ‘literary crime fiction’ is ...

Laddies Who Launch

’Tis the season to be merry, tra-la-la-la, etc. There will, no doubt, be a fair swally of dry sherries lowered in the wake of not one but two book launches next week, with merriment assured at the launch of THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL, the latest offering from The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman. I’m reliably informed that TAFKAP will be doing interpretive excerpts from Riverdance as part of the evening’s festivities at No Alibis (where else?) in Belfast, the shindig kicking off at 6pm next Monday evening, November 17th. I’ve just finished TAFKAP’S A-OK TDOTJR, and enjoyed it even more than MYSTERY MAN, the eponymous ‘hero’ of which returns to investigate The Case of the Cock-Headed Man. Having much more in common with THE MALTESE FALCON than THE DAY OF THE JACKAL, TDOTJR boasts a fabulous McGuffin and more red herrings than the McCarthy witch-hunt. Gerard Brennan has all the details, as always, over at CSNI …
  That’s next Monday taken care of. Onwards then to Tuesday evening, November 17th, when Alan Glynn will be launching WINTERLAND at Dubray Books, Grafton Street, Dublin, with kick-off around 6.30pm. W (do single-title books qualify for abbreviation?) is a terrific novel, both contemporary and prescient, and a classic crime novel in the way it links conventional, street-level criminality to the highest echelons of business and politics. For more of the same, check out Declan Hughes, Gene Kerrigan and Stuart Neville, all three of whom have turned out excellent novels this year. As for WINTERLAND, I think it’s a superb piece of work, mature and elegant. In terms of its politicisation of criminality, it put me in mind of Liam O’Flaherty’s THE INFORMER and Chinatown. For what it’s worth, I really think this one is worth your time and money …
  Finally, a quick word of thanks to everyone who dropped by and left comments on the whinge-fest below, and also to everyone who linked to it, and got in touch by other means, and generally sympathised. Folks, it’s disappointing but life is otherwise good – it’s not a bad complaint for a freelancer in these straitened times to be so busy you can’t find time to write. Onward and upward …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Gerard Stembridge

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?
DOUBLE INDEMNITY, by James M. Cain. Lean, mean, spare despair. To those who have only seen the splendid Billy Wilder film, you still have a treat in store and a surprise or two.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
George Smiley.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Eric Ambler. Pre-WW2 Europe at its most exotic, fantastic characters, his brilliance on the relationships between high finance, crime and politics set the standard. Favours politics over sex, which may be a downer for some readers, but, overall, if you haven’t yet, do. Now that I think about it, what’s to feel guilty about?

Most satisfying writing moment?
Beginning a rewrite.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
So much good stuff recently I hesitate to choose. While I have favourites right now, I still have a lot more to explore as your blog rather scarily demonstrates, and only time will tell who will survive in the memory. I will mention an earlier book that has stayed with me nearly twenty years on. John Brady’s KADDISH IN DUBLIN is well worth re-visiting both for its insightful contemporaneous portrait of late ’80s Dublin, and that most unusual of cop heroes, the happily married kind.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I want … strong visuals to start, a big juicy character for mains, and a man-size helping of plot with a really BIG Order of tension and plenty of surprise on the side. A big question this, really BIG. Oh I don’t know ... what to choose, what to choose ...

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Choosing when to get up/work/stop working/just think.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Are you joking? Do you want to put the hex on it altogether?

Who are you reading right now?
Recently finished Liam O Flaherty’s strange 1920’s ‘thriller’ GILHOOLEY. Doesn’t really work as a thriller but is of interest for its dark, cynical and occasionally quirky view, of early Free State Dublin. Just beginning TENDERWIRE by Claire Kilroy and really liking it so far.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write. Without hesitation. Of course, I assume God will allow me to read anything I write (he said cunningly).

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
No words wasted.

Gerard Stembridge’s COUNTING DOWN is available now.

On The Perils Of Not Being A Genius: A Grand Vizier Writes

‘Read, read, read and write, write, write’ is what experienced writers tend to say when their aspiring brethren ask for advice on how to become a writer, although the Grand Viz (right, in full-on smug-on-holiday mode) is of the opinion that if you need to be told to read a lot and write a lot, you’re probably not a writer by instinct. Anyhoo, the point being: submerge yourself in story, find out how the best do it, and then do what they do, only different and – hopefully, one day – better.
  Solid advice, for sure, and the most fun you can have while dressed to boot.
  But here’s the kicker – is there a danger of absorbing too much story?
  The Grand Viz has always loved books and movies, and over the last two decades has spent his professional life moving to a point where he now pretty much writes about movies, books and theatre for a living. Nice work if you can get it, certainly. But last Monday, for example, the Grand Viz attended two movie screenings (Meet Dave and Savage Grace), read a goodly portion of Benjamin Black’s new novella THE LEMUR, and saw Tom Murphy’s play The Sanctuary Lamp at the Samuel Beckett Centre in Trinity College.
  The movies, for very different reasons, were both poor; THE LEMUR is terrific fun; and the current production of The Sanctuary Lamp, which the Grand Viz had seen years ago, is excellent.
  The rest of the week was a little quieter from a story point of view, although it still involved watching the movies Baby Mama, City of Men and Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (!), finishing off Fritjof Capra’s THE TAO OF PHYSICS, and reading Liam O’Flaherty’s THE ASSASSIN.
  All of which is wonderful, as the Grand Viz tends to spend most of his week steeped in story, absorbing almost by osmosis the hows and whys of the way others craft narrative, learning from their mistakes, taking note of where they got it right. It seems churlish to complain, especially as there’s a pleasing diversity in terms of story and discipline, and it all generates income for the ever-pressing ‘baby needs new shoes’ fund.
  But is there a danger of saturation? Is there a part of the brain that requires stories in order to be satisfied, and if fully sated, won’t need to create any stories of its own? Is there a danger of becoming imaginatively ham-strung, in the sense that you can begin to second-, third- and fourth-guess yourself, dismissing embryonic ideas as ‘already done’, or not potent enough to rise above the mass of stories clamouring for the public’s attention? And where, once you’ve established that the story you have in mind is fresh, unique and worth another person’s precious time, does the time come from, and enough blank mind-space, to put it all down on paper?
  And all this, of course, is susceptible to the Grand Viz’s sneaking suspicion that no story he could possibly contrive could compete with the interest he has in the narrative of his real life, particularly that of the most recent addition to his family, the endlessly fascinating Princess Lilyput (right).
  The GV does have stories he wants to write and / or redraft, although whether he needs to write them remains to be seen. Matters aren’t helped when he steps out of his reading-for-review routine, as he did last night, and embarks on one of his most self-indulgent pleasures, that of reading a master for the sheer enjoyment of it, in this case Lawrence Durrell’s MONSIEUR, the first of the Avignon ‘quincunx’. It’s at times like these that the Grand Viz begins to wonder if there’s any point in writing anything that doesn’t at least aspire to Durrell’s (for example) quality of writing and scale of ambition. With time so precious – his own time, and everyone else’s – and vast swathes of popular culture engaged in a dizzyingly fast race to the bottom, has the Grand Viz – or anyone else, for that matter – the right to write anything that isn’t, in a word, mind-blowing?
  Of the 41 books the Grand Viz has read so far this year, Cormac McCarthy, John McFetridge, Flann O’Brien, Salman Rushdie, Elmore Leonard, Adrian McKinty and Kurt Vonnegut excited him to the point where he resolved – each time – to abandon reviewing / blogging / his wife (if not his child) in order to get down and dirty with the blank page. Each time, happily enough for his wife, he resisted the temptation. Because he’s saturated, soma-like, with story? Because he simply doesn’t have the time? Or because he’s becoming acutely aware that he’s simply not good enough, and very probably never will be, to match and perhaps even better the stories he most likes to read?
  Questions, questions … Although, the Big Question is, given the outrageously poor time-to-benefit ratio involved in writing novels, at least at the Grand Viz’s level, particularly when said time could be much more profitably spent elsewhere – changing nappies, for example – why bother?
  This month there’s a final edit on the sequel to THE BIG O to polish off, which should be a hugely enjoyable experience, but once that’s out of the way, answers will have to be delivered. One thing is for sure – something’s gotta give, folks, and it won’t be Mrs Viz and Princess Lilyput. Stay tuned …

They Haven’t Gone Away, You Know

SHADOWS OF THE GUNMEN: VIOLENCE AND CULTURE IN MODERN IRELAND is a timely collection of essays from the Cork University Press, especially as many ex-Provisional IRA members and those of the Loyalist paramilitary forces have since the beginning of the Northern Ireland Peace Process diversified into a criminality shorn of political motive. Quoth the blurb elves:

Scholars have long understood the key roles played by violence in the making of modern Ireland. In recent years, studies on violence have become increasingly creative and sophisticated, as scholars have used new analytical lenses to confront the real challenges faced in “writing violence.” Much of the best work in this new literature examines the complex relationships between violence and its representation. SHADOWS OF THE GUNMEN provides a coherent introduction to the latest scholarship. The essays from historians, film scholars, literary critics, and philosophers, SHADOWS OF THE GUNMEN is both relevant to the particular Irish experience and the broader contemporary world. Violence may not speak, but violence is represented and these depictions are continually interrogated and /or contested in public and private arenas across Ireland and abroad. This volume of essays will explore and probe the connection between political/historical violence and aesthetic representations of such violence. The first interdisciplinary study of violence and the modern Irish experience, SHADOWS OF THE GUNMEN is a major contribution to both Irish studies and the broader examination of violence in the modern world.

Edited by Danine Farquharson and Sean Farrell, the book takes its title from Sean O’Casey’s play THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN (1923), which concerns itself with a man who may or may not be an IRA assassin. And while we’re on the topic, Crime Always Pays humbly suggests that students of the origins of hardboiled crime fiction should seek out Liam O’Flaherty’s THE ASSASSIN (1928), a novel based on a true event about an IRA killer who returns to Dublin on a mission of execution, and written in a stark style that prefigures the vivid reality of Dashiell Hammett and the stripped-back prose and staccato rhythms of James M. Cain.