The Turn Of The Screwed

There’s a touch of the old log-roll about today’s post, given that Eoin Colfer was kind enough to say nice things about THE BIG O last week, so I won’t say anything nice at all about his latest adult crime tome, SCREWED (Headline), which will be published on May 9th. The follow-up to PLUGGED, it sounds a lot like this:

Dan McEvoy doesn’t set out to get into violent confrontations with New Jersey’s gangster overlords but he’s long since found that once you’re on their radar, there’s only one way to slip off it. So he’s learned his own way to fight back, aiming to outwit rather than kill unless he really has no choice. But when Dan’s glam step-gran Edit shows up on the hunt for his dishevelled aunt Evelyn, it quickly becomes clear that family can provide the deadliest threat of all. In a city of gun-happy criminals, bent cops and a tough-talking woman detective whose inspires terror and lust in equal measure, Dan may just have reached the point where sharp wit won’t cut the mustard. But can he play the heavies at their own game?

  For a review of PLUGGED, clickety-click here.
  For an interview with Eoin Colfer to mark the publication of the final Artemis Fowl novel (‘Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Fowl’), clickety-click here.

The Turn Of The Screwed

I do love the cover of Eoin Colfer’s forthcoming tome SCREWED (Headline), which concerns itself with the continuing stooooooooooory of Dan McEvoy, the barnet-challenged hero of Colfer’s first adult crime novel, PLUGGED. Quoth the blurb elves:

Dan McEvoy doesn’t set out to get into violent confrontations with New Jersey’s gangster overlords but he’s long since found that once you’re on their radar, there’s only one way to slip off it. So he’s learned his own way to fight back, aiming to outwit rather than kill unless he really has no choice. But when Dan’s glam step-gran Edith shows up on the hunt for his dishevelled aunt Evelyn, it quickly becomes clear that family can provide the deadliest threat of all. In a city of gun-happy criminals, bent cops and a tough-talking woman detective whose inspires terror and lust in equal measure, Dan may just have reached the point where sharp wit won’t cut the mustard. But can he play the heavies at their own game?

  SCREWED isn’t due until May, unfortunately, but if you like your crime fiction with a screwball comedy twist, you could do a lot worse than note this one in your diary, not least because PLUGGED was shortlisted for the LA Times book awards last year, and you’d have to presume that yon whippersnapper Colfer has learned his lessons and got a bit better this time out. Wouldn’t you?

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

The very kind souls at the Overlook Press have offered us a signed copy of Eoin Colfer’s current offering, PLUGGED, to give away to a discerning reader. First, the blurb elves:

The long-awaited crime caper so outlandish, so maniacal, so wickedly funny, it could have only come from the mind that brought you Artemis Fowl. Daniel McEvoy has a problem. Well, really, he has several, but for this Irish ex-pat bouncer at a seedy, small-time casino the fact that his girlfriend was just murdered in the parking lot is uppermost in his mind. That is until lots of people around him start dying, and not of natural causes. Suddenly Daniel’s got half the New Jersey mob, dirty cops and his man-crazy upstairs neighbour after him and he still doesn’t know what’s going on. Bullets are flying, everybody’s on the take and it all may be more than Daniel’s new hair plugs can handle. And Daniel’s got to find the guy who put in those hair plugs - or at least his body - and fast, or else he’ll never get that voice out of his head. Head-spinning plot twists, breakneck pacing and some of the best banter this side of Elmore Leonard’s Detroit, will keep you on the edge of your seat and itching for more.

  It’s been picking up some very nice reviews Stateside, has PLUGGED, with a selection from The Washington Post, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews and the Library Journal to be found here. The gist of the New York Times review runs thusly:

“Dan’s chivalric mission of mayhem makes no logical sense, but it does attract the attention of numerous unsavoury characters and results in lots of bloody fun.” - New York Times

  Nice. To be in with a chance of winning a signed copy of Eoin Colfer’s PLUGGED, just answer the following question:

Who should play the lead role in the inevitable movie of PLUGGED?

  Answers via the comment box, please, leaving an email contact address (and using (at) rather than @ to confound the spam monkeys) by noon on Thursday, October 6th. Et bon chance, mes amis …

On Getting Plugged At Bouchercon

One of my highlights of the forthcoming Bouchercon in St Louis - had I been able to make it - would have been the panel hosted by Peter Rozovsky, ‘Cranky Streets: What’s So Funny About Murder?’, which will feature Colin Cotterill, Chris Ewan (who appears to be on an Uncle Travelling Matt-style walkabout across the length and breadth of the planet right now), Thomas Kaufman and Eoin Colfer.

  There’s a terrific buzz building around Colfer’s PLUGGED, the first adult crime novel from the man who turned teen megalomaniac Artemis Fowl into a literary superstar. There appears to be a growing awareness that, even if Colfer branded the Artemis novels ‘Die Hard with fairies’, there has always been a criminal instinct at play in his YA offerings, as suggested in last week’s interview with the LA Times. To wit:

Colfer, 46, might not have turned his talents to adult fare had it not been for Irish crime writer Ken Bruen, who, five years ago, asked Colfer to write a short story for the DUBLIN NOIR anthology he was editing.

  “I said, ‘I think you’ve got the wrong guy. I do fairy stories,’” Colfer told Bruen, but his colleague insisted that “when you take away the leprechauns, they’re all crime stories underneath.”

  Indeed, they are. In the seven Artemis Fowl books published so far, the crime stories are just populated with nefarious mud people and trolls and other fantasy creatures. What’s different about PLUGGED is the real-world setting, the subject matter — and Colfer’s voice, which, like the many books he’s written for children, is incomparably clever and witty. PLUGGED is just more profane and violent …

  Indeed it is. Meanwhile, there’s good and bad news for Artemis Fowl fans. The good news is, director Jim Sheridan has been confirmed to helm the first movie in the series, which will be produced by the Weinstein brothers; the bad news is, the next Artemis novel, THE LAST GUARDIAN, will be the last.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

  As for the reviews, well, it’s fair to say they’ve been of the glowing variety. Quoth, for example, the Seattle Times:

“PLUGGED is that rare book that mixes terrific suspense with laugh-out-loud humour ... [Danny] McEvoy will appeal to fans of the crime novels of Elmore Leonard and the wacky characters prevalent in the novels of Carl Hiaasen.”

  For those of you attending Bouchercon, Eoin Colfer is as funny in person as the characters he creates on the page, even if he doesn’t have any (immediate) plans for world domination, and his hair is all his own. Miss ‘Cranky Streets’ at your peril …

On Log-Rolling In An Istanbul Smoking Lounge

I was in the smoking lounge at Istanbul Airport a couple of weeks ago, as isn’t my wont, during a layover for our flight to Northern Cyprus, when I got an email from Kevin McCarthy, he of PEELER fame, that pretty much made my holiday even before it properly began. I’d given Kevin an m/s of my forthcoming ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL as part of my ongoing campaign to generate blurbs that might pique readers’ interest, with the proviso that if he didn’t like it, he was perfectly entitled to assert his right to remain silent and / or take the Fifth. I should also point out, in the interests of accountability and transparency, that I liked Kevin’s debut PEELER very much, and said so when I reviewed it for the Irish Times, and that I’ve since met with him a few times and shared a couple of beers. So you might want to factor in all the potential for log-rolling when I present Kevin’s verdict below. To wit:

“ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL is that rarest of things - a novel that makes you stop and think and scramble to finish at the same time. A novel of ideas as well as a first rate thriller, it sees Burke stretching the crime thriller genre until it snaps and then sewing it back together with some of the finest prose and funniest dialogue you’ll encounter this year. It’s a novel that reveals the perverse combination of anomie and lunatic optimism that all novelists feel when in the throes of creation. A brilliant x-ray revealing Greene’s shard of ice in the heart of every writer; the secret sharer in the dark cabin of the novelist’s imagination. Quite simply, one of the finest Irish novels written in a long time.” - Kevin McCarthy

  So there you have it. I thank you kindly, sir.
  By the way, the inimitable Critical Mick reviewed PEELER over at his interweb lair recently, with the verdict running thusly:

“Speaking as both a history nerd and a book nerd, there’s nothing better than discovering a new novelist who completely satisfies both interests. Kevin McCarthy has interwoven literature and historical research, fiction and reality. PEELER is a cracking good tale - an eye-opener in many ways. Consider it personally recommended from me to you - PEELER is the first addition to Critical Mick’s list of Best Books Read in 2011.”

  Meanwhile, and just as my spirits were flagging out in Cyprus, I got a google alert for Eoin Colfer, which proved to be an interview with Eoin published by Kirkus Reviews. The relevant (to me, at least) gist ran thusly:

PLUGGED nails that staccato noir style that keep crime novelists and airport bookstores in business. Stylistically, where do you draw inspiration for the writing of this novel?

“I have been immersing myself in this style for decades and for at least one of those would not read anything but crime. If nobody died horribly, I did not want to know. Of course I loved the classics, but we have our own classics standing the test of time right now: Michael Connelly and John Connolly, Ken Bruen, Mark Billingham, Ridley Pearson, Carl Hiaasen, Declan Burke, Colin Bateman … I want to get on a shelf with these guys and take a photo.” - Eoin Colfer

  Steady on, Tiger! Oh, you mean you want to take a photo of the books … right.
  Anyway, you can take it that I’m pretty damn flattered to be mentioned in such august company. Providing, of course, that Eoin wasn’t confusing me with either Declan Hughes or Edmund Burke. Which happens more often that you’d think. The latter, mostly.
  The Big Question: is log-rolling the new Irish national pastime and / or only growth industry in these benighted times, and should we lobby for it to be introduced as an Olympic sport? Over to you, people …

Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Fowl

I sat down with Eoin Colfer (right) last week, to interview him about his new novel, PLUGGED. The result reads a lot like this:

“I started writing stories before I could actually write,” says Eoin Colfer. “Which sounds strange, but I would scribble on a blackboard, these nonsensical lines, and in my mind I was writing a story, I knew what the story was about.”
  The adult Eoin Colfer is just as happy to let his imagination run riot. A phenomenal best-seller with his young adult Artemis Fowl novels, he turned last year to sci-fi, when he penned the latest instalment in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This year it’s adult crime fiction. PLUGGED is a comedy caper featuring an ex-Irish Army man, Danny McEvoy, deranged by baldness and set loose on the unsuspecting suburbs of New Jersey.
  Writers are advised to write about what they know, but Colfer presents himself in the Fitzwilliam Hotel with a full thatch of greying hair and a neatly trimmed beard, looking not unlike Al Pacino’s younger brother. The quietly spoken one, who doesn’t need to shout and beat his chest, who has nothing left to prove.
  “I really wanted to write PLUGGED for myself,” he says, “because I’d been writing for kids for ten years. But also I wanted to prove - mostly to myself, but to my friends too - that I could write for adults. Because there is a stigma attached to kids’ books, people say to you, ‘When are you going to write a real book?’ That said,” he laughs, “there’s a stigma attached to crime writing too. But maybe not so much.”
  Colfer has come a long way since the days when his children’s books were so successful that he decided to stop writing.
  “It was a tough time,” he says. “My wife had stopped teaching to open a shop, which we put all our savings into, and she wasn’t taking any salary - there wasn’t any salary to take (laughs). And I was teaching, and in the evenings I was minding the baby, putting the baby to bed, and then I’d try to write for a few hours. My early books all went to number one in the charts but I was only earning a couple of hundred quid per book. So something had to go, and the only thing that could go was the writing.”
  Cometh the hour, cometh the Fowl.
  “Well, boys have always liked an anti-hero, but when I finished the first Artemis, I thought, ‘I’m going to be murdered for this.’ This guy is feeding his friends drink, he’s a thief, a bad guy, he shoots his dad at one point … Luckily, in modern children’s fiction, he was the only one of his kind. Since then, there have been quite a few like him, and I’ve even been sent a couple of them to blurb, which I think is funny. I think the best one was a blatant mixture of Artemis Fowl and Harry Potter, it was kind of a criminal genius academy, with magic (laughs). It was actually quite good.”
  With a best-selling career in children’s books established, Colfer struck up an unlikely friendship with Ken Bruen, the hard-boiled laureate of Irish crime fiction. Bruen persuaded Colfer to contribute a short story to his collection of short stories, ‘Dublin Noir’, which was published in 2006.
  “I was never able to read that story at any of my events,” he says, “because it was always kids attending, but I did one late-night cabaret in Wexford a year ago and I read that story, and everyone was howling with laughter. Right up to the first swear-word I didn’t know whether I was going to chicken out, but then the first one went down so well, and I enjoyed reaction that very much. But I knew I couldn’t sustain that kind of nutcase humour for a whole book, it would get wearying, so I toned it down for the novel.”
  The result is PLUGGED. “I just wanted to go for it, cut loose. I’d been working with kids’ stories for ten years, and as a writer you want to show what you can do.”
  The story started out as a straight revenge thriller, with Lee Marvin movies a reference point, but quickly took on comic aspects.
  “I just find it difficult to write ‘straight’,” he says. “I think there’s an element of that kid in class who just can’t stand the silence, and bursts out laughing in the middle of a serious situation. I guess I don’t like it when I feel the reader might be reading something of mine and maybe getting fed up. So it’s a little bit of a lack of confidence, that you can’t just trust that your prose is going to hold up, that you have to throw in a few one-liners.
  “I’m still determined that some day I will write a serious book, but I have tried a few times already and it hasn’t worked out, so I just go back to the jokes. But at the same time, I think that’s a valid style. As long as you have a good story, any style is fine.”
  In PLUGGED, Colfer does play it straight with Dan McEvoy’s army experience.
  “That’s the one thing I didn’t want to mess with,” he acknowledges, “because the Irish army’s experience in Lebanon is something we’re very proud of as a country. So I didn’t want to start dicking around with that. But I sat down with a friend of mine who served over there, Declan Denny, and he told me some very interesting stories. Just interesting things like how during the day they’d meet the Christian militia on the road, and swap biscuits for milk, that kind of thing. And then the guy would say to Declan, ‘Okay, thank you. I won’t shoot at you tonight. I shoot, but not at you.’ And that kind of living, that day-to-day lunacy, and how they actually get used to it while they’re there, it’s amazing. So I tried to be respectful of that.”
  If PLUGGED lives up to sales expectations, we’ll be seeing Dan McEvoy again, very probably prowling the mean streets of Dublin.
  “Obviously,” he says, “I could write Artemis Fowl books for the rest of my life, that’s where the money is. But without challenging myself, the books would just plummet in quality, I think.”
  As for how PLUGGED will be received, Colfer’s own expectations are pragmatic.
  “It’s not Shakespeare, y’know? But I’m not trying to be Shakespeare. I’m just trying to have fun with a crime novel. And I think if you’re a real fan of crime fiction, this book is for you.”

  Eoin Colfer’s PLUGGED is published by Headline.

  This interview was first published in the Evening Herald.

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

He’s a nice guy, Eoin Colfer. I sat down with him last week to interview him about PLUGGED, and was more than a little disconcerted to realise that he looks - with a new and neatly trimmed beard (not pictured, right) - not unlike Al Pacino’s younger brother. The quietly spoken one, who doesn’t need to beat his chest and hoo-yah! every five minutes.
  The result of that conversation will be turning up one these pages in a couple of days from now, but as always, many important things got left behind on the cutting floor when the interview went to press. Here’s Eoin on Ken Bruen, to whom PLUGGED is dedicated:

“The story I tell is that he’s the only writer I’ve ever written a fan-letter to. This was before I knew him. When I read THE GUARDS, I just couldn’t believe it, because you’re expecting one thing - and you get that - but you also get so much more. What I like about Jack Taylor is that he doesn’t really do anything, he just kind of walks around and goes to the pub, and things just happen to him. On occasion he’ll make the effort, but you’re basically rambling around Galway with this guy, and yet it’s incredibly entertaining and also touching, and you just know that it isn’t going to end well. It’s a bitter-sweet thing. If you read that series of books and someone comes into it you like, just don’t get attached to them, because if Jack likes them, they’re doomed. So it’s a weird way to read a series. It’s a bit like the way Dickens wrote about London, when people were afraid to like his characters, in case Charles decided to kill them off (laughs). So yeah, I’m a huge Ken fan. It’s just a nod, but then I wouldn’t want to copy him, even if I could. He’s copied so much now, and that’s when you know you’ve made an impact. He’s a real writers’ writer. I travel around the States a lot, and every crime store you go to, they love him. People here don’t realise how popular he is. Everybody loves Ken. An incredibly generous man, too, with his praise and his time, and his willingness to work with other people.”

  Hard to argue with that. I liked PLUGGED a lot, by the way. Here’s an excerpt from the review I wrote for the Irish Times:

“The result is a gloriously ramshackle comedy crime caper; as a narrative vehicle, the story is a getaway car careering downhill and losing wheels at every corner. Colfer, however, is too experienced a storyteller to get carried away himself. The propulsive chaos masks a palpable appreciation of the crime novel itself, not simply in terms of his playful subversion of the genre’s tropes, but also in Colfer’s willingness to warp the parameters of what is essentially a conservative narrative form.”

  Anyway, after the interview was finished, Eoin asked if I’d like a signed copy of PLUGGED to give away on Crime Always Pays. Erm, yes, please. To be in with a chance of winning said tome, just answer the following question:

PLUGGED is Eoin Colfer’s first foray into adult crime fiction. What non-crime author would you like to see turning his or her hand to crime writing, and why?

  Answers via the comment box, please, leaving a contact email address, using (at) rather than @ to confound the spam monkeys. The closing date is noon on Friday, May 19th. Et bon chance, mes amis …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: PLUGGED by Eoin Colfer

Eoin Colfer, as they say, has form. Best known for his young adult series of novels featuring the teenage criminal mastermind Artemis Fowl, Colfer has also written HALF-MOON INVESTIGATIONS (2006), in which 12-year-old Fletcher Moon is a pre-teen private eye who mimics the iconic heroes created by Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald.
  In the same year, Colfer made his first foray into adult crime fiction, contributing ‘Taking on P.J.’ to DUBLIN NOIR (2006), a collection of short stories edited by Ken Bruen.
  Colfer’s first adult crime novel, PLUGGED, concerns itself with Dan McEvoy, an ex-Irish Army sergeant who is a veteran of peacekeeping tours of the Lebanon. Now living in voluntary exile in Cloisters, New Jersey, McEvoy’s life as a casino bouncer is shattered when his on-off girlfriend Connie is murdered in the parking lot on the same day his best friend Zeb, a cosmetic surgeon, goes missing from his surgery. Forced to kill in self-defence when confronted with a knife-wielding gangster, McEvoy taps into his soldier’s survival instincts as he races to stay one step ahead of a posse composed of corrupt cops, a vengeful Irish-American mobster boss, and a megalomaniac lawyer with homicidal tendencies.
  Colfer dedicates the novel to Ken Bruen, and PLUGGED is in part an homage to the author credited with a radical reimagining of the role of the first-person protagonist in the contemporary crime novel. Colfer goes so far as to adopt some of Bruen’s narrative strategies, including an anarchic and frequently implausible plot, surreal flights of fancy, and a story that blends frenetic action sequences with an internal monologue that regularly digresses into the realms of the absurd.
  The result is a gloriously ramshackle comedy crime caper; as a narrative vehicle, the story is a getaway car careering downhill and losing wheels at every corner. Colfer, however, is too experienced a storyteller to get carried away himself. The propulsive chaos masks a palpable appreciation of the crime novel itself, not simply in terms of his playful subversion of the genre’s tropes, but also in Colfer’s willingness to warp the parameters of what is essentially a conservative narrative form. Successfully blending the sub-genres of comedy crime caper and hard-boiled noir is no mean feat, as those who have read Donald Westlake’s pale imitators will confirm, and Colfer’s exuberance in this respect will delight the connoisseurs jaded by crime novels which insist on adhering to an established and predictable norm.
  Colfer isn’t the first Irish crime writer to incorporate comedy, of course. Ruth Dudley Edwards, Garbhan Downey and Colin Bateman are among those who sugar the pill for appreciative readers, and PLUGGED has more than its fair share of gags, puns, prat falls and punchlines. Colfer works from a particularly dark palette throughout, such as when he parodies the genre’s penchant for the verbose antagonist:

“Thank God for grandstanding killers. Back home my squad were once brought in to hunt for an IRA kidnap squad who had crossed the border. We only caught them because they delayed a scheduled execution so they could film it from a couple of angles. Everyone wants their moment.” (pg 82-83)

  The county of Sligo, incidentally, previously lampooned in AND ANOTHER THING … (2010), Colfer’s contribution to the Hitchhiker’s Guide the Galaxy series, takes another lick here when Colfer sidesteps a sexist joke “that there is no place for in the modern world, except perhaps in County Sligo, where they love a good mysognism.”
  Humour aside, and given that the novel unfolds as a first-person narrative, the story stands or falls on Colfer’s ability to convince us that Dan McEvoy is a man worth following. Here Colfer has an unerring instinct for the genre’s most conventional hero, the good man doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. McEvoy ticks all the boxes in this respect, yet he is sufficiently deranged, and simultaneously conscious of his foibles, to make him a character worth the reader’s investment of time and emotion.
  Scabrously funny, furiously paced and distinctively idiosyncratic, PLUGGED ultimately comes to a belated reconciliation with the genre’s conventions, but only after a titanic and entertaining struggle that suggests Colfer’s first adult crime novel will not be his last. - Declan Burke

  This review first appeared in the Irish Times.

  Meanwhile, Eoin Colfer had a chat with Barry Forshaw over at Crime Time, where he explains his reasons for writing PLUGGED, with the gist running thusly:

“PLUGGED is a slice of modern noir fiction where I have tried to genre-bend a little by introducing a Walter Mitty internal monologue and large sections of black comic humour. What I am trying to achieve is a sense of ‘pleasant surprise’ in the reader where they get a little more than they had expected. So perhaps the reader expects a straightforward ‘gorgeous dame walks into a PI’s office’ yarn and they get something slightly more frenetic. Of course, what you don’t want to do is give the reader an unpleasant surprise where they really wanted the dame/P.I. yarn and you have ruined their day - so the humour is built around a standard noir skeleton where a guy’s girlfriend is murdered and the finger is pointed at him because of his past.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Laughing All The Way To The Bank

The Independent carried an interview with Eoin Colfer on Sunday, to celebrate the forthcoming PLUGGED, Eoin’s first foray into adult crime fiction. A nice piece it is, too, although there was one line that jarred. To wit:

The book is unusual because it’s funny, although Colfer says he originally tried to write it straight. “He was initially very much the implacable hero, in the Lee Marvin type, out for revenge, no messing around. But I couldn’t sustain it. It just felt like I was trying to write someone else’s book. Then one joke got in, and then another one. Initially the character wasn’t the brightest guy, but then I started to leak in a bit of psychology and he became more knowing and aware of his own foibles, so I had to go back and change it all and make it much funnier.” He is full of ideas for future adventures, but adds: “It’s a very fickle world. The public might decide there’s already a funny crime writer so we don’t want you.”

  All of which suggests that PLUGGED won’t be entirely unlike the Parker novels rewritten Carl Hiassen - I haven’t read it yet, but that should be rectified in the next couple of weeks or so (the book is officially published on May 12).
  The line that jarred, though - ‘The book is unusual because it’s funny …’ Not to cast asparagus on Susie Mesure’s research for the piece, but there are at least four Irish authors writing comedy crime fiction, among them Colin ‘Nine Inch’ Bateman, Garbhan ‘Girth Unknown’ Downey and Ruth ‘Cuddly’ Dudley Edwards. Broaden it out to the international stage, and (off the top of my head) you have the aforementioned Carl Hiassen, Christopher Brookmyre, Donald Westlake, Simon Brett, Alexander McCall Smith, Chris Ewan, Jasper Fforde, Christopher Fowler and LC Tyler. In fact, there are so many comedy writers that Bristol’s Crimefest has a dedicated ‘Last Laugh’ award.
  That said, humour is a very subjective thing. I think Elmore Leonard is a very funny writer. Sara Gran’s forthcoming CITY OF THE DEAD is a comic masterpiece. James Patterson, of course, is the funniest writer alive.
  Anyway, niggling aside, I’m pretty sure that (a) PLUGGED will be very funny, and (b) the public will find room in their hearts for another funny crime writer, especially one who’s earned his licks with the Artemis Fowl series.
  Over to you, folks. Any comic crime writers I’ve missed?

On Putting The Art Into Artemis

I’m generally not too fussed about cover art, I have to say, but once in a while a book comes along that reminds me why I should be. Eoin Colfer’s ARTEMIS FOWL celebrates its 10th anniversary with a series of revamped covers, and it’s fair to say that the designer(s) earned his or her corn. Jaw-droppingly beautiful stuff, and congratulations to all involved.
  For the rest of the Artemis Fowl redesigns, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, Eoin Colfer popped up in the pages of the Irish Times last week with his contribution to World Books Day, in a feature which asked writers about the one book they think everyone else should read. Eoin picked THE GUARDS by Ken Bruen. To wit:

“I am a big fan of genre fiction. I suppose the books I like best are the ones that surprise me, which is a little ironic for someone who reads genre stuff. I like books where you think you know exactly what you are getting and suddenly find yourself thrown for a loop as the author injects some reanimating concoction into the formula’s corpse. Lately I have been reading a lot of crime, and more specifically Irish crime. We have several writers making their mark internationally for the very reason that they have brought something fresh to the genre. Declan Burke, Colin Bateman and John Connolly are a few of the breakthrough stars, but for me the man that stands out is the Galway noir-king, Ken Bruen. If you are a crime aficionado and you have not read Bruen’s Jack Taylor series, then you are seriously missing out. I remember picking up THE GUARDS, which is the first book in the series, at Dublin airport, and subsequently staying awake all the way across the Atlantic just to finish it. I was expecting standard private-investigator fare, laced with laconic humour, which would have been fine, but what I got was sheer dark poetry. It was a tale of addiction, loss and Ireland, without the leprechauns. This book was so good it prompted me to write my first fan letter, which Ken actually responded to. THE GUARDS will blow you away. Usually I would round off with a sentence beginning with, “If you liked so and so, then you will love THE GUARDS,” but this time I cannot do it, because there is nothing like Bruen’s work. You have to read him to understand. I have bought about 20 copies of this book for friends and every one of them now worships at the dark and bloody altar of Bruen, whose writing is a lot less melodramatic than mine without a single mention of dark and bloody altars.”

  That’s all very nice, isn’t it? Personally, I’m particularly chuffed with the way Eoin lumped me in with Ken Bruen, Colin Bateman and John Connolly, although - as always - I’m inclined to believe it was a typo, and that Eoin meant to reference Declan Hughes.
  Anyway, keep a weather eye out for Eoin Colfer’s first adult crime novel, PLUGGED, which will be winging your way in May. Herewith be all the details …

Grow Up, Colfer! Oh, Right …

Rumours of an adult crime fiction novel from Eoin Colfer have been circulating ever since he contributed ‘Taking on PJ’ to the Ken Bruen-edited collection of short stories DUBLIN NOIR (2006), but lo! the moment is finally upon us. Almost. PLUGGED will be published in May, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

Dan, an Irishman who’s ended up in New Jersey, finds himself embroiled in a world of murder, kidnapping and corrupt cops. Dan works as a bouncer in a seedy club, half in love with hostess Connie. When Connie is murdered on the premises, a vengeful Dan finds himself embroiled in an increasingly deadly sequence of events in which his doctor friend Zeb goes mysteriously missing, a cop-killing female cop becomes his only ally, and he makes an enemy of ruthless drug-dealer Mike Madden. Written with the warmth and wit that make the Artemis Fowl novels so irresistible, though with additional torture and violence, PLUGGED is a brilliant crime debut from a naturally gifted writer with a huge fanbase.

  Brilliant or otherwise, I’m not so sure about it being a ‘crime debut’ - Artemis Fowl is the greatest criminal mastermind of his generation, and HALF MOON INVESTIGATIONS was / is a superb homage to the Chandleresque detective novel, albeit one starring the 12-year-old playground PI, Fletcher Moon: (“My name is Moon. Fletcher Moon. And I’m a private detective. In my twelve years on this spinning ball we call Earth, I’ve seen a lot of things normal people never see. I’ve seen lunch boxes stripped of everything except fruit. I’ve seen counterfeit homework networks that operated in five counties, and I’ve seen truckloads of candy taken from babies …”).
  Excessively pedantic quibbles apart, it’s all kinds of good news that Eoin Colfer is joining the teeming ranks of (adult) Irish crime writers. Is it too much to ask that the sequel feature an acoustic-guitarist-turned-hitman and be called UNPLUGGED?

What Fowl Beast, His Hour Come Round At Last …

Leaving aside the Artemis Fowl series for one moment, anyone who has read Eoin Colfer’s (right) HALF MOON INVESTIGATIONS will know that he has a genuine affection for the tropes of crime fiction. The short story ‘Taking On P.J.’ in the Ken Bruen-edited DUBLIN NOIR further suggests that Colfer has the chops to write for an adult audience as well as a YA one. So the news - which comes via The Bookseller, although CAP first mentioned it way back in November 2007 - that Colfer is to publish an adult crime thriller is long overdue. To wit:

Headline has acquired Eoin Colfer’s first foray into adult fiction, a noir crime-thriller entitled PLUGGED, for publication next year. Marion Donaldson bought British Commonwealth rights for an undisclosed sum, in a deal conducted by Sophie Hicks at Ed Victor. The deal was completed yesterday afternoon (9th June). The deal does not affect Colfer’s ongoing relationship with Penguin, which publishes his children’s books.
  Donaldson said: “[Writing for adults] was just something he decided to have a go at, and he has done it completely brilliantly. We were very keen right from the start, as everyone is such a huge fan of his children’s series Artemis Fowl. Obviously, this is intended for the adult market - there is a certain amount of violence in it - but you can still hear his voice in it, and people who have grown up on Artemis Fowl will be drawn to it. It’s very different [to his children’s books], but it has that tone.”
  PLUGGED is set in New York and New Jersey, and the main character is an Irish man “who lives just this side of the law but gets embroiled in things outside of the law”, Donaldson said.
  It will be a lead title for Headline next year, with a paperback to follow later in the year or 2012, she added. Although the deal is just for one book, Donaldson said the team “would hope he would write more”. She added: “We would love to see him continue with the character, although there is no commitment to write more books - we are just very excited to have one.”

  All of which is fine and dandi-o for Eoin Colfer, but that’s yet another quality name to be added to the seams-bursting list of top Irish crime novelists. Think of the fan club meetings, people! Much more of this and we might have to use an open-air phone-box next year …