Review: A SONG OF SHADOWS by John Connolly

The 13th novel in the Charlie Parker series, John Connolly’s A Song of Shadows (Hodder & Stoughton, €22.50) opens in Maine’s remote coastal town of Boreas. Recuperating from grievous wounds sustained in his previous outing, A Wolf in Winter (2014) – Parker was declared clinically dead before being resuscitated – the private investigator is drawn into a bizarre case when an obsessive Nazi-hunter is discovered dead on a nearby beach. No stranger to evil, and still coming to terms with his experience of another realm about which “he still had questions, but no doubts,” Parker finds himself immersed in the horrors of the Holocaust, and determined that this particular evil will not thrive on his watch. Connolly has been engaged for some years now in gradually refining the supernatural and horror tropes that gave the Parker novels their distinctive identity, and A Song of Shadows, blending the language of myth and New Testament into a hardboiled tale, marks a significant shift in Parker’s metamorphosis into an explicitly Christ-like figure (“This one bleeds from the palms,” observes one of his foes). That notion has been explored before, most notably by Ross Macdonald and James Lee Burke, and while A Song of Shadows more than earns the right to be judged in such company, Connolly further appears to be breaking new ground, not least in terms of Parker’s haunting relationships with his daughters, one dead and one living. It’s a fabulous piece of work, in both senses of the word, from one of contemporary fiction’s great storytellers. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

Interview: Michael Connelly

I had an interview with Michael Connelly (right) published in the Irish Examiner last week. It ran a lot like this:

Early on in the new Michael Connelly novel, ‘The Gods of Guilt’, defence lawyer Mickey Haller – aka the Lincoln Lawyer – emerges from the courthouse, rushes down the steps and sits into the back of his Lincoln town car, only to discover it’s the wrong Lincoln.
  “What happened after the movie [The Lincoln Lawyer] came out,” says Michael Connelly, “was I started hearing from people who were saying, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the way I operate as a lawyer as well.’ So there’s a lot of copy-catting and so forth going on, and I really enjoyed breaking that fourth wall and mentioning that there’s a film out there in which Mickey Haller is portrayed by Matthew McConaughey. And I thought it’d be a fun thing to do, that Mickey comes out of the courthouse and doesn’t know which Lincoln town car is his.”
  Connelly, in Ireland to headline the recent Irish Crime Fiction Festival at Trinity College, was ‘very happy’ with The Lincoln Lawyer movie, although its success has proved something of a double-edged sword.
  “The movie version changed my profile,” he says, “and I ended up selling a lot of books, and the movie probably made the Lincoln Lawyer series more popular than the Harry Bosch series. That was strange for me, because I’m all about Harry Bosch, and doing The Lincoln Lawyer book in the first place was designed to allow me a break from Harry, so I could come back to him strong. So it’s a little bit odd to have the main character that I want to write about in life coming in second to that,” he laughs.
  The title of ‘The Gods of Guilt’ refers to the jury Mickey Haller faces in the courtroom, but it also has a personal resonance for Mickey himself. “He’s seeking redemption for things he has done in his professional life,” says Connelly, “but also in terms of very damaging things that have happened to people in his personal life.”
  Indeed, it’s Mickey Haller’s personal life, and his growth as a character, that has ensured Michael Connelly is no longer ‘all about Harry Bosch’.
  “I’m finding that the Lincoln Lawyer series is cycling the way the Bosch series did, just ten years later. I think it took me four or five Bosch books to really put that series on a plane where it was about Harry and his character, where I was thinking about that first before I got into thoughts about plot. This is the fifth time I’ve put Mickey centre-stage, and I’m thinking more about him as a person, or a character, and how he sleeps at night and how he lives. So I feel good about that.”
  Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller have intersected in previous Connelly novels, and do so again in ‘The Gods of Guilt’, when the pair meet in a courthouse hallway. Bosch is a cop, a man driven to bring the bad guys to justice; Haller is a defence lawyer, whose job it often is to see that his client – bad or otherwise – gets acquitted.
  “It’s funny,” says Connelly, “but somebody said this great line – ‘Harry Bosch is driven by justice, and Mickey Haller is driven by a chauffeur.’ That really underlines how different they are.”
  Is the contrast between the half-brothers, who have been appearing in alternate novels of late and have much in common in their personal lives, including teenage daughters, a deliberate ploy by Connelly?
  “What’s deliberate about it is that I also have a daughter who is the same age as those girls,” he says, “and I think what I’m doing is that with one guy [Harry Bosch], and lucky for him, I’m writing about a father-daughter relationship that’s working – tentative but working. And then there’s one that’s not working. So on the one hand I’m working on what I don’t want to happen to me, and on the other hand I’m writing about what I think would be cool to have happen to me.” He shrugs, then grins. “I mean, it could all shift around. You never know.”
  ‘The Gods of Guilt’ is Michael Connelly’s 26th crime novel, although he’s wary of pigeon-holing himself as any particular kind of author. “I really don’t go for any kind of classifications,” he says. “People say I’m a mystery writer, but I don’t even classify myself as an American writer – I’m just a writer.”
  His enduring love affair with writing began while he was at college, and happened to see Robert Altman’s film of the Raymond Chandler novel ‘The Long Goodbye’. He immediately read and re-read all of Chandler’s novels, then packed in his engineering course and went home to announce that he was becoming a writer. His father suggested he become a policeman, to learn the world of crime from the inside, but, he says, “to become a detective you’ve got to spend years in a uniform and being that kind of cop first. And I didn’t think I had the personality or desire to go through that. So going the Joseph Wambaugh route, where you do the work and then write about it, was knocked off early. Then the journalism idea came up, and that sounded good to me.”
  Connelly spent six years working the crime beat as a journalist in Florida and wound up being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Offered a job with the LA Times, he moved in 1987 to California, the spiritual home of the private eye novel. His debut novel, ‘The Black Echo’, was published in 1992. It featured Harry Bosch, a LAPD detective, but Connelly never lost sight of his first literary love, the private eye novel.

  “Since the very first book I’ve always had the idea that Harry would be an outsider with an insider’s job,” he says, “but every step of the way he would feel like an outsider. That’s the feeling I got, and the inspiration I got, from Chandler’s books. I was a journalist for a long time before I started writing these books and so there was a practical aspect when it came to deciding what I was going to write. Do I ignore all the years I spent in police stations and talking to detectives and learning about their world, and just go off and write a private eye novel because I love those novels? No. I was practical. I wanted to get published. I followed the path of what I knew I could bring to the genre. So I made Harry Bosch a cop, but I certainly brought everything I’d learned from Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler to the character.”
  “In my mind I visualise any Harry Bosch story, even though he’s a cop and there’s all kinds of people at his disposal, forensics and so forth, I’ve always just viewed him in a tunnel by himself – the case is the tunnel he’s going through,” he continues. “When I think of Mickey Haller, the visual image has a lot of people in it – it’s a courtroom full of people. So one is more of a private investigation, and one is more of a public examination.”
  The good news for Harry Bosch fans is that the detective will soon feature in his own TV series – Connelly oversaw the shooting of the pilot show before coming to Ireland. “I’m an executive producer,” he says, “and I co-wrote the script with Eric Overmyer, who worked on the The Wire and Treme, he’s a really good writer. So Harry Bosch is in really good hands, I think.”
  Better still is the news that, even if Bosch is forced to retire as a cop in the next couple of books, he will very likely reinvent himself as a fully-fledged private eye, the classic romantic tarnished knight of the genre. Could Harry go to work for Mickey Haller?
  “That’s an option,” says Connelly, “but that’d mean Harry would be working to help Mickey ameliorate the situations of some bad guys. I don’t see Harry being able to do that. If anything I can see Harry and Mickey on opposite sides.
  “I can see him being the kind of private eye who maybe comes in a does cases he’s not even asked to do,” he continues, “something he’ll see in the paper, some injustice or some need for justice, that’s what will get him going. So yeah, there could be some cool stuff ahead.”

  ‘The Gods of Guilt’ by Michael Connelly is published by Orion (€19.99).

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Nobody Ever Knows What Anybody Else Will Do

John Connolly, talking about the enduring appeal of the crime / mystery novel, expresses it best for me with the deliciously pithy, “Character is mystery.”
  I’ve come across two variations on that notion in the last week or so, in Raymond Chandler’s THE LADY IN THE LAKE and Ross Macdonald’s THE GOODBYE LOOK. Chandler first:

  “Nobody ever knows what anybody else will do, sister. A cop knows that much.”

  And Macdonald:

  “That was good timing,” she said to me. “You never know what George is going to do.”
  “Or anybody else.”

  All of which makes a mockery of the rule that people should always behave ‘in character’ in novels. If everyone always behaved as they should, life and fiction would be very boring indeed.

A Secret Passion For Mercy

Justice as blood, agony and revenge came up in William Goldman’s MARATHON MAN a week or so ago, but Ross Macdonald’s private detective Lew Archer offers a rather different take in THE GOODBYE LOOK. To wit:

  “That isn’t your real motivation,” [she said]. “I know your type. You have a secret passion for justice. Why don’t you admit it?”
  “I have a secret passion for mercy,” I said. “But justice is what keeps happening to people.”

  Mercy isn’t a quality we usually associate with the crime / mystery / thriller genre, but it’s probably why Ross Macdonald is one of the enduring greats, and why he is considered a superior – or more sophisticated, at least – writer when compared to his predecessors, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
  I still hold a candle for Chandler, but maybe that’s because I’ve read virtually everything Chandler wrote and I’ve only read four or five of Macdonald’s novels so far.
  Tobias Jones had a very nice piece on Ross Macdonald in the Guardian way back in 2009, in which he writes about the evolution of Macdonald as a writer, from being a disciple of Hammett and Chandler to outstripping both in terms of his ambition for the private detective novel. He also quotes Macdonald on plot:

“It should be as complex as contemporary life, but balanced enough to say true things about it. The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.”

  The full piece is here …

On Good Readers As The Greatest Reward

I’m quite fond of the notion that a book is only half-written by its author, and that it only begins to come alive when someone turns the first page and starts to read. It follows, then, that a book is only as good as its readers allow it to be - although it’s also true, as a kind of corollary, that an especially attentive and receptive reader may make a book better than it actually is.
  Such is the case, I fear, with the reviews SLAUGHTER’S HOUND picked up during the past week, with three readers picking up on different aspects of the novel. To wit:

“This is a dark tale, and it gets progressively darker as it goes along. In the middle, it reminded me a bit of Ross Macdonald, and also of his Irish literary descendent, Declan Hughes, with its tale of doomed families and the ruin that attends them. But there is a kind of go-for-broke quality to this book that I haven’t really found in the aforementioned illustrious writers’ work, and it took me till nearly the end of the book to realize that Burke has laid it all out for us in the very title of the work, and in a helpful author’s epigram, in which he notes that the great warrior Cú Chulainn’s name really means Hound of Ulster and that he owned a number of war hounds called archú, who were known for their love of slaughter … It is a tale steeped in the tradition of the Irish myth cycles, where deeds are great, but, well, bloody.” - Seana Graham

“This novel is a tragedy, which takes place in a town called Sligo, a location that could be Thebes or any other place in the world where the frailties of good men and women are exploited by the eternal cynics and they become the playthings of the gods, where a man can sleep with his mother without knowing she is his mother or kill his father without knowing whom he is killing, and be punished as if he had knowingly committed the two heinous crimes. As he twists and turns in the nets that have been set for him, the hero’s every good intention or action goes wrong, and Harry Rigby reminds you at times of Job and at other times of Oedipus. His every decent human trait, such as loyalty or friendship, is exploited by the people around him and each betrayal plunges him a little further into the circles of hell … Highly recommended.” - John J. Gaynard

“SLAUGHTER’S HOUND is yet another ‘How the hell does he do that?’ offering from author Declan Burke, whose book ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL has already secured a spot on my Top 10 Reads of 2012 list. More than just a crime fiction / noir novel, SLAUGHTER’S HOUND vividly brings to life the post-investment boom hangover much of Ireland is experiencing, personified by the Hamilton family. Once obscenely wealthy, the family is now teetering on financial ruin and, as Rigby learns, also has some incredibly dark secrets stashed away in the closet along with the skeletons. Lead by its ice princess matriarch, Saoirse, the Hamiltons add a Shakespearean level of drama, complete with a conniving attorney.
  “The story which unfolds is a beautiful balance of tremendous heart and horrific violence.” - Elizabeth A. White

  As you can imagine, that’s all very pleasing indeed.

I was certainly aiming, with SLAUGHTER’S HOUND, to splice together aspects of modern noir and classical tragedy, not least because the forms have so much in common. As Seana and Elizabeth point out, I was riffing on the motif of ‘doomed families’ that feature in the work of Ross Macdonald and Declan Hughes, although I’d be the first to say that SH comes up very short by comparison with both. Seana also mentions the epigram at the beginning of the book, and its reference to the Irish myth cycles, and I was conscious of that historical narrative too; but for a very long time, as John Gaynard detected, the epigram for SLAUGHTER’S HOUND came courtesy of Horace Kallen, from his intriguing THE BOOK OF JOB AS A GREEK TRAGEDY, which I wrote about here last January.
  So there you have it. Apologies for the trumpet-blowing, folks, but there are days, many days, when writing offers precious few tangible rewards. Good readers, on the other hand, are the greatest reward any writer can hope for.

Laddies Who Launch

A busy week hoves over the horizon, with a number of book-related events piling up at the far end. First we’re off to Belfast on Thursday to launch BOOKS TO DIE FOR in the Ulster Museum, along with John Connolly’s THE WRATH OF ANGELS and mine own SLAUGHTER’S HOUND, all of which will take place under the watchful eye of David Torrans of No Alibis.
  Then it’s back to Dublin on Friday, where John launches THE WRATH OF ANGELS at The Gutter Bookshop in Temple Bar. Should be a cracker.
  On Saturday, I’m off to the Electric Picnic to do an event with Ken Griffin, which I am very much looking forward to. Given that the Picnic is an outdoor music festival, and pretty much takes place in the biggest field I’ve ever seen, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the weather report for sunny conditions holds. Otherwise it’ll be like the bloody Ploughing Championships down there. And welly-boots are not a good look for yours truly.
  Back to BOOKS TO DIE FOR, though. The book’s web lair has for the last week or so been featuring short videos from some of the contributors about their choice for BTDF, including pieces from Julia Spencer-Fleming, Meg Gardiner, Lee Child and Katherine Howell. For more, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, here’s a sample, this from Linwood Barclay, who talks about why he picked Ross Macdonald’s THE GOODBYE LOOK and his personal relationship with Ross Macdonald. Roll it there, Collette …

Strange Days Indeed

I read the latest George Pelecanos, WHAT IT WAS, last week, and very enjoyable is exactly what it was. It’s a Derek Strange ‘origins’ novel, set in 1972, with Watergate simmering away in the background; as well as Derek Strange, it features Frank Vaughn and Nick Stefanos. Derek even wanders by a record store called Nutty Nathan’s at one point …
  If it all sounds a little self-referential, it is - but in a good way, a bringing it all back home kinda way. There’s something oddly elegiac about the tone, given that it’s an origins story; but at the same time the novel fairly bops along, a swaying, swaggering, finger-clicking slice of funked-up cool. I’ll review it in a bit more depth in a week or so, when I’ve finally surfaced for air; for now I’ll leave you with an interview with George Pelecanos I had published in the Irish Times today. It starts a lot like this:

“LET ME ASK you a question,” George Pelecanos says as our interview comes to an end. “Are you a Thin Lizzy fan?” Given my Dublin connection, he has been itching to ask it all along. “I just think it’s an amazing story,” he says. “I get chills when I think that there’s a statue of Phil Lynott on a street in Dublin, that people leave flowers by the statue. I love stuff like that.”
  Music has always played an important part in George Pelecanos’s novels. From his debut A Firing Offense in 1992, his characters have prowled the mean streets of Washington DC, tapping a toe to a bewildering variety of sounds, from the swing jazz of the 1930s through the funk rock of the 1970s and on to the contemporary sounds of last year’s The Cut. In fact, it was music that taught him how to write his own way.
  Pelecanos wasn’t much of a reader until his mid-20s – “Until then I wanted to be a filmmaker, I was a real film nut” – but then he took a class in classic crime fiction. The curriculum included Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Ross Macdonald and James Crumley.
  “All these books blew me away,” he says. “I mean, even an early Mickey Spillane, that’s a good book. I got obsessed with books after taking that class. And by books I mean crime novels.”
  Rejecting the notion of a formal writing class, Pelecanos instead chose to immerse himself in reading. “It took me 10 years before I sat down to write my first novel,” he says. “By then it was the 1980s, the punk thing had happened, and I was heavily involved in that. And I got the idea that what I was going to do was write a punk rock detective novel …”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

A 51st State of Mind

When I was putting together DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS, I thought Declan Hughes would be a shoo-in for an essay on the history of the crime narrative in Irish theatre. Dec Hughes was, of course, a critically acclaimed playwright before he turned to writing the Ed Loy series of novels, and there are many - yours truly among them - who hope that he might yet be persuaded to return to the craft, just so long as it doesn’t interfere with his writing novels.
  Anyway, Dec Hughes declined to write about the Irish theatre and crime, preferring instead to pen an essay on the American influence - and particularly the troika of Hammett, Chandler and Ross Macdonald - on the contemporary Irish crime novel, and fascinating reading it makes too. The essay is up on Scribd, with the opening running a lot like this:

Irish Hard-boiled Crime: A 51st State of Mind
By Declan Hughes

Irish people can be especially prone to magical thinking, to put it at its kindest. We seem extremely reluctant to relinquish our belief in phenomena that neither experience nor reason will justify. The most notable and poignant example of this is our relentless credulity regarding the existence and quality of the Irish Summer.
  Although year after year, a solitary sunny day is followed by unending weeks of overcast skies and squally rain, hope springs infernal. In my case, this belief, or “superstition”, took root when I was thirteen, during the (genuinely) long hot summer of 1976. Every morning I would assemble a lunch and spend the day on Whiterock beach in Dalkey, alone or with friends. I swam and read and looked longingly at girls in bikinis and wondered how that, and everything else, was going to go. And that’s pretty much how I spent my subsequent teenage summers, often in delusional defiance of the weather. I never got a job, because I didn’t drink back then, could get all the books I needed from the library, experienced a certain amount of success in finding out more about those mysterious bikini-wearing creatures, and didn’t want anything else money could buy as much as I wanted to be on the beach and in the sea, even if the rain fell and an east wind tested your faith in the Irish summer to the limit.
  There was music in the air during that time, of course, and for all that punk rock had happened and post punk followed in its wake, and for all that I had developed a ferociously puritanical line in rock snobbery which permitted me to like virtually nobody except the Clash and Bruce Springsteen (which was convenient, since I could barely afford their records, let alone anyone else’s), the soundtrack I still associate with Whiterock during those years was the Eagles’ Hotel California. (You didn’t have to buy Hotel California: in the late ’70s in South Dublin, it played for free from every shop doorway and bedroom window). Cowboy boots and flared Levis and plaid and cheesecloth shirts and droopy moustaches and long hair were the order of the day for the half-generation ahead of me, and their musk of patchouli oil and dope smoke seemed like an intoxicating promise, a hazy benediction from alluring adepts of a laid-back cult I longed to join. The cult did not just dream of America, and more specifically, California; it seemed to believe it was already living there. And as I gazed out to sea on whichever blue sky day I could find or recall, I knew I was worthy of confirmation in their faith, for that was where I believed I was living too. The Ireland that presented itself to us day-to-day in the ’70s was still run by priests and nuns and decrepit old bogmen in tweed suits, and claimed by murderous bigots intent on shooting and bombing everyone who disagreed with them into a fantasy vision of the glorious republican past; nobody who dreamt of truth, beauty, youth and love could tolerate either as a reality ...

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, those of you who missed the podcast of Declan Hughes and your humble scribe shooting the breeze about GREEN STREETS on RTE’s Arena programme should clickety-click here …

UPDATE: Richard L. Pangburn reviews DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS over at Little Known Gems, suggesting that the book is, “An anthology … filled with brilliant ideas and surprising points of view, an examination of Irish crime literature by those who now write it, packed with verve and humour that sparkles, a treasure chest of emerald noir.” With which we are very well pleased. We thank you kindly, sir …
  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE RISING by Brian McGilloway, BLOOD MONEY by Arlene Hunt, and THE CITY OF LOST GIRLS by Declan Hughes

You can call them genre conventions or you can call them clichés, but the male protagonists in crime novels tend to have a lot in common. Whether cops, private eyes, crusading journalists or ex-military veterans, they’re generally misanthropic loners with addiction issues - booze is the most popular - and while they rarely have trouble attracting women, they have huge problems holding on to them. They are, as Raymond Chandler dubbed them, the tarnished white knights, who go down those mean streets without becoming themselves mean, and whose sense of justice remains undimmed no matter how many beatings they take on our behalf.
  Three recent Irish crime novels have taken those conventions and tossed them out the window. Inspector Benedict Devlin, the main character in Brian McGilloway’s Donegal-set series of police procedurals, is as happily a married man as any married man is likely to be. Devlin has two kids, no addiction issues, and is no more cynical about the human race than any policeman is entitled to be having achieved the rank of Inspector. In all, he’s an unusually clean-cut credit to his family, his country and the Gardai.
  THE RISING is the fourth Devlin novel in the series, and as has been the case in the previous novels, Devlin is the juncture where personal and political collide. Here the political is provided by the eponymous Republican splinter group, which is gathering local support on both sides of the North / South border around Strabane and Lifford for its zero tolerance approach to drug dealing. One of the leading lights of The Rising is an old foe of Devlin’s, Vincent Morrison, who has served his prison term and emerged with his debt paid to society. When Devlin’s 11-year-old daughter Penny develops a crush on Morrison’s son, Devlin finds himself compromised in relation to the investigation he is conducting into the brutal murders of small-time drug dealers.
  Devlin is far removed from the by-all-means-necessary kind of copper to be found in crime fiction, and part of the enjoyment of THE RISING is seeing one of the consequences of the post-Good Friday peace process - that of ex-paramilitaries turning to more prosaic forms of crime - through the eyes of a family man who is as concerned for his daughter’s well-being as he is with conceptual notions of justice and accountability. That said, McGilloway claims no moral high ground for Devlin, who is on occasion moved to use his fists in brutal fashion when his domestic life is infringed upon.
  For all that the story is peppered with outbreaks of violence and murder, McGilloway, writing in the spare, unadorned style of classic noir tradition, never renders the violence lurid or gratuitous. Nor does he break faith with the reader by having his methodical inspector depend on hunches or gut instinct for his big breakthroughs. Instead the story imitates police procedural as closely as any entertaining novel is allowed, depending on the steady and stealthy accretion of detail and nuance rather than show-stopping flourishes designed to mythologise both the process and its protagonist. It’s an approach that whets the appetite even as it sates it. McGilloway improves with every novel, and the latest Inspector Devlin - Morse without the affectations, basically - is fast becoming an annual must-read.
  Arlene Hunt also plays with the conventions in her latest offering, BLOOD MONEY. In her previous novels, the QuicK Investigations partnership of Sarah Quigley and John Kenny has been dominated by Sarah, the cool and thoughtful yin to John’s impulsive and occasionally boneheaded yang.
  In BLOOD MONEY, as a result of events in the previous novel, Sarah has disappeared, leaving John to investigate a case of apparent suicide brought to him by a grieving mother. Alison Cooper is a dedicated doctor, a married woman and a loving mother. Although her husband Tom had an affair a year previously, the pragmatic Alison is highly unlikely to have taken her own life as a result. Has there been foul play? Hunt juxtaposes John’s investigation with a parallel tale in which Pavel Sunic, a Bosnian Roma, travels to Ireland to hunt down the person responsible for his sister’s death.
  It quickly becomes apparent that John and Pavel are both investigating the murky world of international organ trafficking. This gives the novel a contemporary flavour, and also imbues the tale with an uncomfortable moral conundrum - what would you do, the story asks implicitly, if it was your nearest and dearest who could well die waiting for an organ transplant to arrive through the conventional channels? Hunt, who personalises the theme in her acknowledgements, leaves the answers up to the reader. John Quigley is not a detective burning with a sense of justice undelivered. Instead he is a man who engages in his detective work because it is his job, his way of paying the bills, and if he is no less diligent for all that, his prosaic style - knocking on doors, taking statements where he’s let, accumulating tiny amounts of information that may or may not prove useful - has a powerful ring of authenticity, not least in terms of the number of petty obstacles he encounters on his travels.
  Ed Loy, Declan Hughes’ private detective who gets his fifth outing in THE CITY OF LOST GIRLS, comes closest to the Chandlerian notion of the tarnished white knight in Irish crime fiction. In the past Hughes has very deliberately cultivated Loy as an Irish version of Lew Archer, the private eye who featured in Ross Macdonald’s novels and made a speciality of investigating the skeletons in wealthy families’ closets.
  While families and their dark secrets play their part in THE CITY OF LOST GIRLS, here Hughes has Loy investigate a different kind of family, the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ led by Jack Donovan, an old friend of Loy’s and an Irish film director made good in Hollywood who has returned home to make his masterpiece on home soil. When two extras go missing from the movie set, Loy is called in to investigate their disappearance. Loy immediately remembers that three girls went missing, never to be found, on another Jack Donovan shoot, this one some 15 years previously in California, and suspects that a serial killer might be at work.
  Loy, previously a hard-drinking, self-torturing romantic, has mellowed somewhat since his last appearance, in ALL THE DEAD VOICES, when he met Anne Fogarty, a divorced woman with two children. Now settled into his own version of suburban bliss, the detective is more pragmatic about life in general, and is willing to overlook humanity’s faults in a way he might not have in previous outings. Nonetheless, Loy’s sense of justice remains undimmed, even if his reasons for pursuing it have changed.
  A compelling page-turner, THE CITY OF LOST GIRLS also marks a new departure for Hughes. Always a fine stylist, he has here brought an new maturity and assuredness to his blending of three separate voices - the first-person narration by Loy, Anne Fogarty’s third-person perception of Loy, and the serial killer’s first-person justification for his killings - to create a courageous, challenging and ambitious novel. There is also a subtle investigation of what it means to be Irish now, an attempt to sift some truth of who and what we are from all the doom-and-gloom headlines. In all, it is a powerful tale from a gifted storyteller. If there is to be a better Irish novel this year, it will be a very fine piece of work indeed. - Declan Burke

  This article first appeared in the Sunday Independent

The Gospel According To John

Oh, to have John Connolly’s air-miles. Last week JC (right) turned up at Ireland House, NYU, to give a talk on Irish crime writing. Seamus Scanlon was on hand to make feverish notes on behalf of Crime Always Pays, although he neglected to mention whether or not Irish crime writing’s Noo Yoik guardian angel, aka Joe Long, was in attendance. Mind you, I’m guessing trained polar bears wouldn’t have kept Joe out … Anyway, on with the review:



Last week, John Connolly gave an erudite and scholarly review of Irish crime fiction at NYU’s Glucksman Ireland House. Dr John Waters, Director of the Undergraduate and Graduate Irish Studies Programs at NYU, recounted how John attended a literature workshop at Ireland House a few years ago, and not only were the students impressed but he was himself, much to his surprise - by the level of John Connolly’s insight, intensity, intelligence and literary knowledge.

  Dr Waters acknowledged that crime fiction by Irish writers had been ignored within academe until very recently, and he included himself in this category, but he is impressed by its vivacity and power and stylistic exuberance.

  Dr Waters told an anecdote where, in typical Connolly style, John brought a box of his crime novels to the workshop. In subsequent weeks the faculty was slightly alarmed that students were neglecting prescribed texts and reading John Connolly. Eventually they were able to restore the balance!

  John Connolly then delivered an entertaining and cogent analysis of crime fiction - the essential elements, its history, why it was slow to develop in Ireland, why it flourished in the US, why his own sub-specialty of supernatural crime is marginalized by the crime fiction establishment, while crime fiction itself is marginalized by the mainstream critics and academics.

  Since the literary establishment’s dogma in Ireland even in the late 1990s was that Irish writers needed to engage in the Irish experience (whatever that was), it had no resonance for him – so setting books in Ireland or discussing Irish issues were not on his agenda, and as a result John Connolly was not on the literary radar.

  He picked Maine as the setting for his books because the place had an immediate resonance for him - it reminded him of Ireland in some senses, but it had sharper changes in seasons which he liked, nobody knew him, there was no constraints on subject, it had great landscapes and great bleakness, it was the home of strange characters, it had a long history (it was settled early) and it had a deeply ethereal dimension to it that he did not find elsewhere in the US.

  He outlined how the great crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M Cain and Ross Macdonald was so masterful, impeccable and imbued with integrity that their literary credentials cannot be doubted.
  He displays great humour but his work ethos and writing ethos are tight and steadfast with an almost blindside to any concerns once he is writing. On tour he is generous with fans and hosts. I saw him warmly greet the NYU bookselling staff on the night as well as warmly embrace Bonnie and Joe the owners of the now defunct Black Orchid bookshop. He even had a warm welcome for me, even though I was wearing sandals (it was balmy October night). He has a hang-up about sandals and cat detectives!

  He argued that crime fiction in the US is very strong because it is a logical extension of the essence of the frontiersman - essentially the Wild West motif. You cannot rely on the establishment to solve your problem – the law won’t rush to your defence – sometimes you have to rely on a lone man (usually flawed himself) to restore equilibrium and make sense of the world.

  As a general rule, the police and courts in the UK and Ireland are regarded as the de facto defenders of the common man – citizens tend to think that eventually the police and courts will do the right thing. This inner mindset (largely propaganda and largely incorrect) creates an inherent inertia which stymied the development of detective fiction in both countries. This mindset is deeper in Ireland. Another mitigating factor was that the rural ethos of Ireland prevented the development of noir or detective fiction because urban precincts are the natural backdrop where human interaction and conflict are a daily reality.

  The natural antipathy of the Irish literary world to those who did not engage in the meaning of Irishness (mentioned above) was also a major constraint.

  All of the above factors are changing. The first scholarly analysis of Irish crime fiction is in preparation and Ireland is morphing from the effects of globalization, urbanization, gangland crime, travel, economic progress and decline, isolation, corruption, clerical abuse and political abuse into a complex, ambiguous moral landscape that provides the flux and tension where crime fiction can develop.

  Although this is the first time I suspect that Maeve Binchy will ever be mentioned in this blog, John acknowledged that she and others demonstrated to UK publishers that Irish authors could sell significant numbers of books. (John and Maeve are probably Ireland’s two biggest selling authors.) But the current growth in Irish crime fiction is endangered because Irish people tend not to buy it (nor do the English) and authors cannot rely on US audiences alone. The number of indigenous readers has to increase to maintain the interest and viability of the genre.

  John’s delivery was animated but serious. He instils loyalty and enthusiasm for crime fiction. His favourite maxim from Salman Rushdie, that a writer is someone who finishes writing a book, is simple, but Connolly takes it seriously. With every book he writes (13 so far, 10 million copies sold in 28 languages) he still always falters between 20 and 40 thousand words, doubting his writing and its impact. He gets through it though, and that is good news for the rest of us.

  Thanks to Dr Eileen Reilly, Associate Director at Glucksman Ireland House, and Dr John Waters and all Ireland House staff, for inviting John to speak and welcoming us. - Seamus Scanlon

Declan Hughes: Resistance Is Futile

As befits these recessionary times, Crime Always Pays has gone on a go-slow, paring back all output to a one-day week. But the news that Declan Hughes (right) has been nominated for yet another Shamus is more than enough to get yours truly back at the keyboard, given that this year’s nomination – full list here – is his third Shamus nom on the bounce: he won the debut section in 2007 for THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD, was back in harness in 2008 with THE COLOUR OF BLOOD, and has just been nominated for 2009 for THE PRICE OF BLOOD (winner to be announced at the Indiana Bouchercon, October 16th). Now, without having the patience or time to go through the history of the Shamus awards, I’m sure there have been other writers who have been nominated for three awards in a row – but for their first three novels?
  I know that the news itself is a little stale at this stage, given that the nominations were announced last week, but given that a high percentage of this blog’s readers are Irish, and there remains a resistance among Irish readers for Irish-set crime fiction, it’s certainly worth repeating – Declan Hughes is one of the best PI writers in the world.
  Quite why Irish readers are resistant to Irish-set crime fic is a story for another day, but it’ll be interesting to see what kind of turn-out Hughes gets for his crime writing workshop next month, which kicks off the crime fiction element of the Books 2009 Festival (Dublin, September 12th). If there’s any justice in the world, they’ll need cattle-prods to keep the crowds at bay.
  In a not-unrelated digression, I was at the recent Flat Lake Festival in Monaghan, where I was ‘Who’s he?’ guy in a line-up of yours truly, Declan Hughes, Brian McGilloway and Eoin McNamee. The conversation largely concerned itself with why literary fiction is generally considered superior to crime fiction, although what bugs me about those kind of conversations is the presumption that people only read one kind of story – crime or literary fiction, or sci-fi, or chick lit, or whatever you’re having yourself. I always feel a bit guilty at times like that, because I’m a complete magpie – I’ll read anything once it’s well written, or has a great plot, or terrific ideas. And if you can give me all three at the same time, I’ll come and be your Filipino house-boy for the rest of your life (I’m being rhetorical, McKinty).
  Anyway, the gig finished up with Dec Hughes reading a passage from his latest novel, the fifth Ed Loy, which Dec Hughes has very recently finished (the name escapes me now). When he was finished, Eoin McNamee said, ‘Well, that’s put to bed the idea that crime writers can’t write literary fiction.’ Or words to that effect.
  Perhaps it’s because Hughes takes for his inspiration Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and – particularly – Ross Macdonald that his prose has a lushly gorgeous style, and perhaps it’s that the PI of crime fiction – that eternally wounded romantic – lends itself to the kind of first-person monologue that allows the writer’s imagination to flourish. Either way – and this is for those resistant Irish readers – Declan Hughes is a wonderful writer. And all of the foregoing doesn’t even take into consideration his best novel, in my opinion his latest, ALL THE DEAD VOICES, which won’t even be nominated for a Shamus until this time next year.
  There’s a bandwagon leaving town, people. Its name is Declan Hughes. My advice to you is to be on it when it pulls out.

All The Led Voices

Y’know, in a way it’s kind of disappointing that crime fiction is starting to rear its sordid little head at Irish literary festivals. Last year’s ‘Books 2008’ had a whole programme of crime fiction, as will ‘Books 2009’, while the Flat Lakes Festival in Monaghan is including a crime fic panel for the first time this year. Cuirt in Galway went bonkers entirely this year and invited The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman and Gene Kerrigan, while the 2009 Listowel Writers’ Festival didn’t just embrace the genre, it got Squire Declan Hughes (right) in to teach a crime fic workshop. All of which represents progress, of course, but I can’t help feeling that you’re better off outside the tent pissing in, particularly if you’re engaged in the kind of writing that’s pointing up the flaws in the establishment, which crime fiction is, theoretically at least, or used to be.
  Anyway, Seamus Scanlon was in Listowel for the week that was in it, and was kind enough to ask if I’d like to take a report on Squire Hughes’ workshop. To wit:

This year’s Listowel Writers’ Week, May 27- May 31st, included a very accomplished workshop on crime fiction run by Declan Hughes.   Declan traced the origin of crime fiction (noir version) from the writing of Dashiell Hammett (1896-1961) and Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) to Ross Macdonald (1915- 1983) and beyond. Macdonald is regarded as a near perfect stylist by many including Declan Hughes who lists him as his biggest influence. Other noir crime fiction authors discussed included Richard Stark, George V. Higgins and David Peace. Many other crime novelists were mentioned for various reasons including John Buchan, John Connolly, Elmore Leonard, Cornell Woolrich and Lawrence Block.
  We discussed the police procedural novel versus the PI novel, the criminal as the protagonist versus the orthodox police/PI investigator, point of view, research, whether back-stories are necessary, the concept of series versus one off novels, finding your authentic voice, sense of place and prologues.
  Declan, although a relatively recent arrival to writing crime fiction, has made a big impact to date with his Ed Loy series, winning a Shamus award for his first novel THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD and a 2009 Edgar nomination for THE PRICE OF BLOOD. THE COLOUR OF BLOOD is currently on the shortlist for the 2009 Crime Novel of the Year at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, July 23rd-26th. His current offering is ALL THE DEAD VOICES.
  Declan was an intense reader and analyst of crime fiction since his teens and this long term immersion shone through during the workshop. As an accomplished playwright, producer and director since he founded Rough Magic Theatre Company 20 years ago, perhaps his writing ability is not a surprise. This theatrical tradition may also explain his strong regard for dialogue in crime fiction which he demonstrated to us from selected readings of various authors.
  Apart from his knowledge and writing he has a more subtle skill which lies in hosting and directing a workshop – this involves the ability to build rapport with the participants, lead the discussion and impart knowledge. He listened closely to the crime writing exercises he assigned us (we read them aloud), provided direction and encouragement and did it with a great sense of humour.
  Many of the ideas from the workshop participants were innovative and arresting. The crime fiction plots they developed were well thought out and good enough to be commercial successes.
  Declan’s spontaneous high energy laughter and genuine interest in our attempts to shape our sometimes macabre stories convinced us all he was a natural born teacher. At the end of the workshop he was surrounded by almost every participant getting books signed – the ultimate accolade for any writer!
  Kudos are due to the fifteen workshop participants who are essential for the success of any workshop. Thanks also to the Listowel Writers’ Festival for including a crime fiction workshop along with the more traditional workshops on memoir, short stories, drama, the novel and song writing. The prose of Chandler and Hammett is now recognized as work of great literary merit (published by the Library of America for example). In time, other crime fiction writers will join that category.
  Special thanks also to Eilish Wren and her team for coordinating the workshop schedules. – Seamus Scanlon

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE LOVERS, THE TWELVE and ALL THE DEAD VOICES

The supernatural has always been a consistent element in John Connolly’s novels and short stories. This is particularly true of the Charlie Parker novels, in which Parker, a private investigator, finds himself drawn to manifestations of evil that luridly and unabashedly tap into the world’s folk narratives to prod at readers’ primal fears. It’s a clever piece of marketing, to blend two of literature’s best-selling genres, in crime fiction and horror, but it takes even cleverer writing to splice the genres convincingly. Connolly is by now the acknowledged master of the gothic noir.
  In recent years, the supernatural has become less and less a presence in Connolly’s novels, to the extent that last year’s The Reapers was a revenge tale with no supernatural aspects at all. The demons are back with a vengeance in his latest offering, however, as Charlie Parker investigates the circumstances of how his father, Will Parker, a well-respected and responsible policeman, came to shoot to death two teenagers in an apparently unprovoked attack, before turning his gun on himself and committing suicide.
  Charlie Parker is plagued by two kinds of demons in The Lovers. The first, the supernatural and more literal kind, have been sent to eliminate Parker at all costs, for fear of what, or whom, his investigations might eventually lead him to. The pair of demons, male and female, are eternal lovers who return to earth time and again, always finding one another, always engaged in their lethal trade.
  The second kind of demons are the metaphorical kind, as Parker comes to realise that he cannot outrun the horrors he has witnessed. The murder of his wife and daughter, Susan and Jennifer, has always been an integral part of the Parker psyche, but the tragedy plays a more powerful part in the backstory to The Lovers than usual, as Parker finds himself haunted by their shades. As rendered by Connolly, the characters are not ghosts, nor angels, nor undead, but creatures that seem to be entirely new in the realms of the supernatural. Without recourse to cliché or sentimentality, Connolly creates vivid characters in ‘Susan’ and ‘Jennifer’, in the process adding a layer of profundity to a page-turning thriller.
  But then The Lovers, for all that it appears to be an unconventional but genre-friendly take on the classic private eye story, eventually reveals itself to be a rather complex novel, and one that is deliciously ambitious in its exploration of the meanings behind big small words such as love, family, duty and blood. As all the classic literary private eyes eventually come to do, Charlie Parker spends the bulk of the novel investigating himself, in dogged pursuit of his own identity, as he tries to untangle decades of lies, half-truths and the well-meant obfuscations of his father’s former partners and friends. Connolly has penned some very fine novels over the last decade or so, but this is arguably his finest to date.
  Stuart Neville’s debut novel The Twelve also features supernatural elements. As it opens, we find ex-IRA killer Gerry Fegan plagued by the ghosts of those he murdered during ‘the Troubles’. The ghosts are demanding blood vengeance, but it’s not Fegan’s blood they want: it’s the blood of those who ordered the killings, those who used Fegan as a tool – albeit a willing tool – to achieve their sordid aims.
  Last year, in The Truth Commissioner, David Park introduced a fictional ‘truth and reconciliation’ process to the landscape of Northern Ireland’s post-Troubles fiction. That novel, and The Twelve, are attempts to deal with the consequences of the Peace Process, and particularly those elements of the Peace Process that attempt to gloss over the ugly truth of three decades of cold-blooded, sectarian murder. Neville’s novel posits Gerry Fegan as judge, jury and executioner of the men who orchestrated killing campaigns for personal gain, and gives a fictional voice to something crucial that has been sadly lacking in reality – a heartfelt, profound apology from the killers for all the agony inflicted on ordinary people.
  Gerry Fegan is an utterly compelling character, as chillingly ruthless as Richard Stark’s protagonist Parker, but driven by conscience and a desire to absolve himself of his sins by putting right his own small corner of the world, even if that means making the ultimate sacrifice. Stuart Neville’s novel deals in a very pragmatic way with contemporary issues, but he isn’t afraid to introduce some very old-fashioned concepts, not least of which are guilt, redemption and – potentially, at least – a spiritual salvation.
  The ghosts that haunt Fegan are another old-fashioned touch, but, as with John Connolly, Neville has the talent to believably blend the tropes of the crime novel and those of a horror, in the process creating a page-turning thriller akin to a collaboration between John Connolly and Stephen King. For all that the shadows of Fegan’s world are populated by ghosts, however, Neville never explicitly states that the supernatural is a reality. Fegan is the only character to see the ghosts, and as the novel progresses, it becomes more and more apparent that the ‘ghosts’ are in fact manifestations of Fegan’s guilt, a consequence of his internalising his conflicts.
  Whether or not Fegan and his ghosts come in time to be seen as a metaphor for Northern Ireland itself, as it internalises and represses its response to its sundering conflicts, remains to be seen. For now, The Twelve is a superb thriller, and one of the first great post-Troubles novels to emerge from Northern Ireland.
  The dead also play their part in Declan Hughes’s latest novel, All the Dead Voices. The fourth outing for Hughes’s Dublin-based private investigator Ed Loy, the novel peels back the skin of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland to reveal the festering corpse beneath.
  In terms of the great fictional private eyes, Ross Macdonald took up the baton from Raymond Chandler. Where Chandler deployed Philip Marlowe to investigate the culture and society of 1940’s California, Macdonald used Lew Archer as a means of investigating the family as the microcosmic society. Declan Hughes employs the Macdonald model to get at the truth of contemporary Ireland, as Ed Loy infiltrates families and uncovers their secrets, excavating skeletons and unravelling histories.
  In All the Dead Voices, Hughes’s most ambitious novel to date, the personal becomes political. When a fifteen-year-old murder case is re-opened, Loy is employed by the victim’s daughter to investigate the former suspects for the killing, a list that includes an ex-paramilitary, a property developer, and a psychotic gangland kingpin.
  There’s a wonderful immediacy to Hughes’s depiction of recession-hit Ireland, and not least because the novel feels at times as if it has been ripped from yesterday’s breathless newspaper headlines. Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history, but the crime novel can often function as its second draft, given its obsession with diagnosing the world’s ills and exploring its taboos. Where Hughes excels, however, is his ability to position the reader at the nexus where crime meets civilised society.
  While Hughes appreciates the private eye’s heritage, and acknowledges the romantic notion of the cynical PI as a tarnished knight, he is also aware that the intimacy of the Dublin setting is paramount. Thus, when Loy meets with a former paramilitary, or a gangland boss, the detective is not descending into some kind of Dantaesque inferno, or tentatively engaging with criminality for the sake of a greater good. Loy, if not already on first-name terms with the criminal fraternity, generally knows a man who is, the implication being that Irish society at large has a familiarity with crime that doesn’t always manifest itself as contempt. As with Gene Kerrigan’s recent Dark Times in the City, and Alan Glynn’s forthcoming Winterland, Hughes’s novel subtly explores the extent to which, in Ireland, the supposedly exclusive worlds of crime, business and politics can very often be fluid concepts capable of overlap and lucrative cross-pollination, a place where the fingers that once fumbled in greasy tills are now twitching on triggers.
  Written in the laconic and staccato rhythms of the classic hard-boiled private eye novel, and featuring a cast of vividly drawn ne’er-do-wells and no little amount of pitch-black humour, All the Dead Voices is crucial reading for anyone who wishes to understand how modern Ireland works. – Declan Burke

  This review first appeared in the Sunday Independent

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Tim Maleeny

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?
Quite a few … damn near anything by Ross Macdonald, Loren Estleman or Elmore Leonard … but if I had to pick one I’d probably say THE MALTESE FALCON, if only because I’d want to be able to say that Sydney Greenstreet starred as one of my characters in the movie adaptation … even the way they shot him in that film, the camera down low and him looking gigantic, was pure genius.
What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Travis McGee.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Comic books, pulp adventures from the thirties, old issues of Spy Magazine.
Most satisfying writing moment?
When I figure out the ending, usually halfway through the manuscript.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
It’s a high bar, isn’t it? That other Declan, the lovable reprobate Declan Hughes, he wrote a kick-ass novel in THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD. And Ken Bruen writes like a poet — THE MAGDALENE MARTYRS is one of my favourites. Adrian McKinty, I lost count of how many times I recommended DEAD I WELL MAY BE. But since I’m talkin’ to you and I’m not above kissing ass, I’ve no problem saying THE BIG O is a work of pure genius. The sheer unbridled mayhem of it appeals to my world view, sort of a cross between Hiaasen, Guy Ritchie (before he started banging Madonna and got artistically distracted) and Raymond Chandler on meth.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Those listed above, no doubt. Ken’s stuff is almost written like a screenplay, very spare, totally character-driven.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst … deadlines. The need for discipline. My inability to type without looking at the keys. Best …The channelling of the characters into dialogue on the page. Having it done, then reading it as if someone else wrote it. Getting fan mail from folks who loved escaping into your twisted corner of the world and can’t wait to go back.
The pitch for your next book is …?
Elmore Leonard writing an Agatha Christie novel while drinking tequila.
Who are you reading right now?
Neil Gaiman.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
First I’d call Him a prick for forcing such a choice on a man, then I’d probably say … I’d probably say … fuck, I’d probably say read, then when He wasn’t looking I’d burn something to make charcoal so I could use it to write while He slept.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Unapologetic. Visceral. Mayhem.

Tim Maleeny’s GREASING THE PINATA will be published in December.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Charles Salzberg

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?
There are so many of them--anything by Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, especially THE BIG SLEEP, or Ross MacDonald. They were really the inspiration for writing SWANN’S LAST SONG. And maybe an unlikely candidate, DESPERADOES, by Ron Hansen, about the James, Dalton and Younger gangs.
What fictional character would you most like to have been?
I try to think of myself as a fictional character, it gets me through the day – and night. But if pressed, I suppose it would have to be one of those detectives, like Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe, who always seemed to know what they were doing, even if they didn’t know why.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Well, I don’t think of reading anything as doing something guilty. We all do enough guilty things during the course of a day. I actually think of reading anything today, with all the diversions there are – the internet, TV, movies – as virtuous. But I guess I’d have to say the New York Post, a tabloid here in America, especially Page 6, the gossip page.
Most satisfying writing moment?
Getting a book published, especially one like SWANN, which I first wrote nearly thirty years ago. But I’ve got other unpublished manuscripts in my drawer and getting one of them published would certainly be a satisfying moment.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
I could probably google myself to death to come up with what I’d consider the best Irish crime novel, but then I’d be guilty of lying, so I’m going to tell the truth and unmask myself as a terrible impostor because I read very little crime fiction, though I’ll see every crime movie ever made.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Again, I’ll have to demur here. Besides, what great book ever makes a great movie?
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Best thing: you don’t have to go out when the weather’s inclement. Worst thing: having to actually write.
The pitch for your next book is …?
I’m planning a sequel to SWANN, where’s he’s gotten out of the business and become a cable TV installer, but is dragged back into “the game”, and becomes involved in the stealing of and selling of rare books.
Who are you reading right now?
I’m reading a book of short stories by Bruce Jay Friedman called THREE BALCONIES, and a non-fiction book by Jerome Groopman, called HOW DOCTORS THINK, as well as trying to catch up with a bunch of New Yorker magazines lying around. I’m an inveterate magazine reader.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Read. Hands down. It would be a way to avoid writing, which every writer worth his or her salt wants to do.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …
Varied. Conversational. Character-driven.

Charles Salzberg’s SWANN’S LAST SONG is published by Five Star.

Messrs Connolly And Hughes Would Like To Announce …

Perennial messers John Connolly and Declan Hughes launch THE REAPERS and THE DYING BREED, respectively, at Dubray Books on Grafton Street in Dublin next Thursday, May 8th, and have been kind enough to extend an invitation to toddle along to anyone who happens to be in the general vicinity (possible consequences pictured, right). For no further information whatsoever, or at least not yet, you could always check out Dec Hughes’ interweb yokeybus, The Parting Glass; and for even less information, if that were possible, try John Connolly’s blog – albeit with the kicker that there’s a smashing piece on Ross Macdonald’s THE CHILL, which is the first book in JC’s on-line book club. The Grand Vizier has deigned to allow the elves and HR Pufnstuf the evening off to attend, although the flying monkeys are still grounded after the recent ‘unpleasantness’ with the belly-dancing dwarves in the Duke pub. Anyhoo, Critical Mick, sir? If you bring the picinick basket, I’ll bring the blanket and the Yogi Bear quips …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE DYING BREED by Declan Hughes

With his first two novels, THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD and THE COLOUR OF BLOOD, Declan Hughes established his series protagonist, Ed Loy, as a private investigator very much in the mould of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer. The novels, set in a fictionalised Dublin, Ireland, are largely concerned with dysfunctional families, and how the sins of the father (and / or mother) are almost inevitably visited on their offspring. There is at times an almost Biblical quality to the way in which Hughes insists that the blood passed on is diseased by deeds which, if not exactly Evil with a capital E, are certainly the venal outworkings of an ambitiously grasping generation infected by the vast sums of newly available cash sloshing around courtesy of Ireland’s ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom.
  Hughes returns to this theme in his third novel, THE DYING BREED (aka THE PRICE OF BLOOD for its U.S. release, through William Morrow). Commissioned by a dying priest, Fr Vincent Tyrell, to find a former jockey who has gone missing, Loy has only a name to go on. But Fr Tyrell’s name is in itself evocative: the priest is the brother of the hugely successful racehorse trainer and breeder FX Tyrell. Soon Loy finds himself immersed in the murky underworld of Irish horse racing, with dead bodies piling up as he inches closer to the dark heart of a family that appears to have much in common with the Medicis and the Borgias.
  Hughes, a former playwright, is a veteran at establishing mood, pace and tone at an early stage, and the Christmas period during which the events swiftly unfold is as much a player in this story as any of its flesh-and-blood characters. He’s also very good at weaving together a number of diverse sub-plots, and here touches on a number of hot-topic issues of recent Irish history: corruption in Irish horseracing; neglect and abuse in Church-run industrial schools; the declining influence of the Church when juxtaposed with the inexorable rise of Mammon; the infiltration of all levels of Irish society by illegally amassed wealth. The style, which is of the tough, hardboiled variety, owes as much to Raymond Chandler as it does Ross Macdonald, with Hughes showcasing a deft hand at leavening the grim tone with flashes of mordant wit: “Neither had been a jockey; the plasterer sounded amused at the suggestion, the solicitor mysteriously outraged, as if I’d accused him of being a sex criminal, or a DJ.”
  The plotting, dense and complex, draws the reader further and further into a web so tangled that it becomes claustrophobic, and while the ambition is laudable, there is a sense that Hughes may well have bitten off more than he can comfortably chew. By the denouement, events have turned so complicated that Loy finds himself unable to be in at the death, and so must hear how the climactic finale occurred second-hand, courtesy of his excitable sidekick, Tommy. In saying that, there is also a palpable sense that Hughes has enough confidence in his ability to bend the rules of the first-person narration out of shape, and ironically comment on the limitations imposed by the genre, and in this he is in the vanguard of a number of Irish writers who are testing the limits of the conventional crime novel, among them Tana French, Ken Bruen, Benjamin Black, Brian McGilloway, Gene Kerrigan and John Connolly.
  In the end, all crime novels should be judged on how well they convey their insights into the environment that caused them to come into being, and on that reckoning Declan Hughes has confirmed the promise he has shown with his first two novels. THE DYING BREED is a complex, labyrinthine, gritty, coarse (and, yes, bloody) novel that exudes a brash confidence and an ambition that lies beyond its grasp – a description, it should be said, that could easily be applied to the nation that spawned the novel. It may not be the Great Irish Crime Novel some of us were hoping for, but as a snapshot of modern Ireland, it is a clearly focused picture of our faults and failings, and perhaps even our virtues too. – Declan Burke

Crimes Against Crime Fiction # 2,102: The Daily Telegraph

The Daily Telegraph ran a feature on Saturday entitled ‘50 Crime Writers To Read Before You Die’, and we’re still not sure if we should laugh or cry. Yes, we’ve always had a sneaking fondness for GREAT EXPECTATIONS as a noir-ish tale – but Charles Dickens as a crime writer? Hmmmmm ... Happy days for The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman, who gets the following entry: “Any appearance by Bateman’s regular protagonist, journalist Dan Starkey, heralds the imminent death in amusing fashion of half the population of Belfast. Comic thrillers that are actually comic and thrilling.” Hurrah! Okay, now for the crying bit: the list of 50 does not – repeat not – include James M. Cain, Ross Macdonald, John D. McDonald, W.R. Burnett or Horace McCoy. Seriously. But it does – repeat, does – include Benjamin Black. Wot? Benny Blanco? ARE YOU FRICKIN’ KIDDING US?????

Blood, Glorious Blood

“Christmas hadn’t meant much to me in a long while, but I had always liked Advent, the way the anticipation was so intense it could make you clean forget the inevitable letdown in store, just like a bottle, or a woman. Although when a priest sends for a private detective three days before Christmas, the distinction between anticipation and let-down tends to blur: the only thing you can properly be prepared for is the worst.”
      Declan Hughes, THE PRICE OF BLOOD

Yep, it’s Dublin PI Ed Loy, courtesy of Ireland’s very own Ross Macdonald, Declan Hughes, whose latest Ed Loy novel THE PRICE OF BLOOD hits the shelves in March. The good news? It’s only the third in a proposed five-book series. The synopsis-style gist runneth thusly:

Father Vincent Tyrrell – brother of noted racehorse trainer FX Tyrrell – summons private investigator Ed Loy and then simply gives him the name of a missing man – Patrick Hutton – and expects him to take the case. When an exasperated Loy protests that a name does not a case make, Tyrrell pleads the sanctity of the confessional as an excuse for saying no more, but assures Loy the matter is sufficiently grave to merit an investigation.   Loy takes the case, in part because he is hard up for money, so much so that he is double-jobbing: hired by a young couple to find out who is dumping refuse on the green space across from their house, the trail leads Loy to an illegal dump where he finds the body of a young man; before the Guards arrive, Loy finds a phone number on the body, which also bears a distinctive tattoo. The number links to a prominent Dublin bookie who, in turn, links to FX Tyrrell.
  Meanwhile, a dark-haired beauty called Miranda Hart inveigles herself into Loy’s company, offering information about the Tyrrells and more besides. All the while Leo Halligan, the third and most dangerous of the Halligan organised crime family, is out of jail and on Loy’s trail for helping to send his brother down.
  When a body is discovered in a shallow grave on the Wicklow / Kildare border with the same tattoo as the first, Loy discovers it’s the distinctive tattoo sported by jockeys who ride for the Tyrrellscourt Stables: it all points to the body being Patrick Hutton’s, and to the trail leading to FX Tyrrell himself.
  Against the climactic backdrop of the Leopardstown Racecourse Christmas Festival – four days of racing that enthrall the entire country, from the punter lurching from pub to betting shop to the society ladies dining in private boxes high above the turf – as FX Tyrrell attempts to break the course record for winners, Ed Loy must let the light in on the secrets told in the dark of the confessional; he must uncover the blood spilt and the money spent, all the trading and dealing, the gambling and breeding that make up THE PRICE OF BLOOD.

There’s an actual price on blood now? God be with the days when you could have a pint of blood for a flagon of cider and 20 Woodbine, no questions asked …